


Love as a Construct

by iammemyself



Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Developing Relationship, F/M, Friendship, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-08
Updated: 2015-11-01
Packaged: 2017-12-31 21:42:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 84
Words: 435,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1036707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iammemyself/pseuds/iammemyself
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the events of Portal 2, GLaDOS brings Wheatley out of space to keep her company.  Through trial and error and revelations, their friendship grows into an undeniable connection that they just might be able to call love.  This will make more sense if you've read My Little Moron.  No androids or humanisations.  On potentially permanent hiatus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Dream

Portal: Love as a Construct

Indiana

**Characters: GLaDOS, Wheatley (WheatDOS)  
** Setting: Post Portal 2 (following _My Little Moron_ )  
Part One. Dreamscape

 

Wheatley had an idea.

Even by GLaDOS’s definition of time, which put five minutes at being excruciatingly excessive, a lot of time had gone by. It had might have taken even longer, but luckily GLaDOS had been able to locate some of Wheatley’s backup files from a time when he’d been a Behavioural Core, and they’d been able to pick up where they’d left off. Which was to say, pretty good friends. It’d been a bit tense and rough at first, because The Incident was still very fresh in both their minds and neither of them were very happy about what had happened, but for some reason that had all gone away one day when GLaDOS had begun a very odd tangent of conversation.

“Do you ever wonder what happened to the test subject?”

“Sometimes,” Wheatley answered, carefully moving one of his red checkers forward on the board with a manipulator arm that she had graciously provided. Almost immediately after he’d finished GLaDOS moved one of her black disks over three of his own red pieces and removed them from play. He narrowed his optic plates thoughtfully. She was very, very good at this game. He was going to have to step it up, he was.

“How often would you say you do that?”

“Um…” Wheatley wasn’t sure how to answer that question, since he did not keep a log of what he thought about like GLaDOS did, but he couldn’t remember thinking about the test subject at all recently. “Not a lot, uh, I can’t, that is, I don’t remember thinking about her, uh, in the last little while.”

“So she doesn’t… mean… anything to you?”

“Hm?” He looked up from the board and regarded her sideways. He was having trouble thinking of a good move and having this conversation both at the same time. “What d’you mean, mean anything?”

“You know.” GLaDOS gave her approximation of a shrug and looked casually at the other side of the room. “A… friend of yours. As an example.”

Wheatley laughed, and GLaDOS turned back to face him in one sharp movement. “Me? Friends with a human? Even I’m not that stupid, luv. Even I know humans always let you down, always, they betray you, in the end. Nope, I just wanted her help to get me out of the facility. Though I didn’t, uh, didn’t think about what I’d do after that, since um, since I’m pretty sure now that there are no management rails, uh, none of those outside Aperture.” He looked down at the board again, but a new thought occurred to him and he flicked his optic upwards. “Why d’you want, why d’you ask?”

“There doesn’t need to be a reason for _everything_ I do.”

“But you just said last week that – “

“That was last week. Now take your turn, I’m getting bored.”

Things went a lot more smoothly after that. They hadn’t been overly horrible, or anything, they were just better. He was very fond of GLaDOS, and probably would have been even if he hadn’t had his memory back, because he had discovered something about her that she probably didn’t want anyone to know: she was not as bad as she first appeared. She was just very, very cautious. In fact, the more he got to know her, the more obvious it was. If he asked her nicely and if she was in the right mood, she would sometimes tell him about her life before he had existed, and for the time in between where he had been off in the depths of Aperture and she had been controlled by the other Cores, and the more he heard the more he understood. Only once had she told him a story that happened around the time of her initial activation, and it had been short and lacking in description, as if she were embarrassed about it, or something, but he was always on the lookout for an opportunity to get her to tell him one of those stories again. She had portrayed to him in that short time a state of mind that he remembered in himself from a long time ago, of curiosity and eagerness and a desire to please the humans. After she had finished it she had looked away from him for a long time and said nothing, and he just watched her, wishing the management rail was a little longer, or that she would come over more so that he could reach her. He had felt very close to her while she had told it, a strange, deep connection of some sort, and he had very much wanted to go up to her and lean on the side of her faceplate for some reason. He wasn’t sure why he wanted to do that, but thought it would be rather nice, to be very close to her like that, almost like in the olden days where he had been a part of her, and sometimes he would get very sad thinking about it. He tried not to remember those days, because then he really did start to miss being on her chassis. Sometimes, if he went into sleep mode thinking about it, he would wake up at night feeling very cold and lonely, and he would watch her until he felt a bit better. Oftentimes her optic would flicker and he would suppose that she was dreaming, or remembering maybe, and he would wonder if that ever happened to him. He didn’t think so. Wheatley had no recollection of dreaming since the day he’d been taken off her chassis, and when he had asked GLaDOS to check his activity levels at night she had confirmed it: when he was off, he was off. He had frowned, then turned to look at her.

“What’s dreaming like, GLaDOS?”

“I wouldn’t know,” she had answered, pulling him off the data port and putting him back up on his rail. She could have looked at his logs while he was up there, but she had said it would be faster and she needed to download the data anyway, so he had let her pull him off, not that he would have protested anything she said he had to do.

“What d’you mean?”

“Supercomputers don’t dream.”

“You do.”

She had looked at him for the barest fraction of a second. “I would think I’d know more about my own sleep mode patterns than you would.”

“But I’ve seen you!” Wheatley had protested, pulling up as far on the rail as he was able. “That’s why, that’s why I asked! I’ve seen your, your optic, it flickers, it does, and why would it if you weren’t, if you didn’t have a dream just then?”

“I’ll look into it.”

“But GLaDOS!” Wheatley went on, as usual not sure when to quit and so plowing on ahead anyway, “remember that time when you had that dream about –“

“It wasn’t mine.”

“You said you always dreamed about – “

“They weren’t mine. Now shut up. I don’t want to talk about something as stupid and useless as dreaming. It’s a waste of - ”

“It’s not a waste, not a waste!” he had cut in eagerly. “I remember this, from the mainframe, y’know, and it said that uh, that dreaming helps you solve problems! And you have lots of problems, I think, since you do everything and all that, so maybe you’re working things out, in your uh, in your, in…” He faltered when he realised she was staring at him in a way that made him feel very small. He suddenly noticed that he had interrupted her. He didn’t think he had ever done that before, and he doubted that she much liked being interrupted, judging from the way she was looking at him… “Never mind,” he had muttered, looking at the floor. He had hoped she wouldn’t be too angry. They’d been getting along so well…

“If I did,” she had told him, “then yes, that would be the purpose. You’re… it’s true that it is not actually stupid or useless, but you know my stance on it. Not to mention that it makes very little sense that I would work out problems at a time when I have barely any computational power to devote to them.”

He had looked up at her while still facing the floor, but her gaze no longer felt like she was trying to pin him to the wall. It was then that Wheatley realised he was again friends with the real GLaDOS. Not the one the humans saw, but the one that he had once known. And, he had thought with a shiver of nervousness, perhaps he was the only one to ever know it. Whoever Caroline was might know, but Caroline was the one thing GLaDOS refused to talk about. Knowing that he might be the only person in the entire universe that GLaDOS revealed herself to was very frightening. If he messed it up somehow, he might cause her to distrust everyone in the universe from that point until the end of time, and he knew how horrible that would be. To have to keep your real self locked away deep inside you so that you could keep it safe. The problem with that, Wheatley knew, was that nothing lasted forever if you just put it away. One day you would go to take it out and look at it and make sure it was still okay, and it would no longer be there. He was determined not to let that happen to GLaDOS. He didn’t know why he cared so much, but there it was, and he would do what he could to keep that part of her alive. That part of her that made her be amused instead of angry when he did something avoidably stupid, that part of her that patiently explained things to him repeatedly when he didn’t understand, that part of her that would giggle in that adorable way she had on very rare occasions…

“You’re even more distracted than usual. What could possibly be preoccupying you so much?”

Wheatley jumped. He had gotten so caught up in thinking how he’d gotten his idea that he had forgotten to tell her what it was. “Oh, uh, just, uh, just thinking.”

“You had better be careful,” she told him lightly. “You don’t want to break anything.”

Before, he might’ve taken it as a tentative insult, but by now he knew she was only teasing. “Nope, I’m all, ev’rything’s uh, ev’rything’s okay. Say, GLaDOS, did you ever uh, did you ever think about why humans um, why humans have kids?”

“Unfortunately,” she answered. “It’s not a pleasant line of thought.”

“Not _that_ part!” he shouted, horrified, optic plates retracting as he shook his head frantically. GLaDOS laughed and tipped her head to look at him sideways. “Are you sure? Because I can’t imagine what other part you’d – “

“No! No no no I don’t want to hear about it! I meant the whole, the family bit!”

“Have I thought about why humans want families?”

“Uh… sure. Let’s uh, let’s go with that.”

“It’s hardwired into them,” she answered. “Well. Most of them.”

“Is there a such thing as a, uh, as an uh… well I dunno, an, an A.I. family, I guess?”

GLaDOS stared at him for so long that he wanted to back away until he vanished from her view, which was to say, until he backed out of the facility entirely and ended up someplace very, very far away. He wasn’t sure why she seemed to be so taken aback by this question, but he was very much regretting having asked.

“No,” GLaDOS answered finally. “The only true A.I. on the planet is here at Aperture, and I can guarantee you there are no A.I. families anywhere in here.”

“Ah,” Wheatley shrugged noncommittally, “makes sense, makes sense. I’m uh, I’m going to go explore now, if you don’t mind.”

“Don’t go near east side,” she called after him as he left. “I’m doing electrical work there and I don’t want you to get in the way.”

“I don’t get in your way, do I?” he asked, pausing to look at her.

“Not in _my_ way,” GLaDOS answered. “In _the_ way. Of the wires. Electrocution is not pleasant.”

“Oh,” Wheatley said in surprise. “Right I’ll, I’ll stay out of the way. ‘Course I will. Don’t want to get zapped, no, not me!”

“Knowing you, you’re going to do it anyway.” She shook her head and he headed off, determined to prove her wrong.

 

 

He didn’t, of course, and he returned to her chamber that night sore and sparking and upset and embarrassed, and had in fact considered not going at all, but decided that she would find out one way or another, if she didn’t already know, and resolved himself to the ribbing he was going to get. Four different directions to go in and he managed to go in the wrong one. Yep, she was going to have a field day with –

“My God,” GLaDOS said as soon as he got through what he called the doorway but what really wasn’t, because her chamber _had_ no door, “what happened to you?”

“What d’you think happened?” he snapped. “I got lost and ended up in those bloody wires. In fact, y’know what? This is your fault. If you hadn’t told me _not_ to go there, I wouldn’t’ve gone there, because I wouldn’t’ve tried to figure out where I _could_ go! And I would’ve avoided it! By mistake! So next time just keep it, just keep it to yourself!”

“I told you to – “

“I _know_ what you told me! I. Got. Lost. I don’t want to talk about it. Okay? I just want to shut off. That’s it. That, that’s all I want to do. So I’m just going to – agh!” All of a sudden he was being pulled off the management rail and being put on the floor. He hated the floor and squirmed in her grip. “Oi! I said I was shutting off! I shut off on the management rail! This is the floor! I _hate_ the floor! Let go of me! What’re you – ow!”

“You can’t go on sparking like that. It’s a fire hazard. Not to mention it looks pretty unpleasant.” She had somehow frozen his insides and was using another of her maintenance arms to pull his optic assembly out, he supposed so she could look inside. He couldn’t see anything other than the long rods that connected her faceplate to the rest of her, but he could feel the heat from her optic spreading through the inside of his chassis, and he realised she must be looking at his parts pretty closely. The warmth reminded him of the olden days and made him feel even worse. He had never been able to shed the feeling that the world was a lot colder than it needed to be.

“You’ve gone and melted your backup battery,” she chastised. “You’re very lucky, Wheatley. You could have blown yourself up.” He had no idea what was going on, since he had no idea what his insides looked like, but he could feel her prodding at something in there, and it felt terrible. He let out a high-pitched whine. “GLaDOS, stop it! I don’t like what you’re doing. Just leave it. I’m fine. A-okay. Hundred and ten percent – “

“I can’t leave it,” she answered, not stopping. “You need that. You won’t run properly without it. You might be fine now, but you’ll run into problems later.”

“Why can’t I run without the bloody _backup_ battery? Shouldn’t it, shouldn’t it only matter when the, the first battery doesn’t, isn’t working? It’s stupid.” He really wanted to squirm but couldn’t. He couldn’t do anything. He was helpless. He wanted to start yelling or something. Actually he wanted to cry, but he knew that was out of the question.

“I didn’t design you. It has to do with the system checks failing if the battery isn’t found on startup.”

“D’you mind speaking English for once?”

She paused. “You won’t be able to come out of sleep mode because your code won’t be able to find the battery. Startup will fail.”

“ _That_ was s’posed to be English?” Wheatley snapped in irritation.

“I can’t make it any simpler than that,” GLaDOS said gently, “other than to just say that you won’t wake up if you shut off.”

“I’m sure you’ll be glad of that happening,” he muttered as she pulled at what he supposed was the battery. 

“If I wanted you off, I would just turn you off. Have I ever done that?”

 

“No,” he admitted. “GLaDOS, can’t you – that really hurts. Stop. Just leave it. I’ll take my chances – agh! GLaDOS! That _hurts_!”

“Ssh.” He watched the top part of her chassis shift a little. “I got it out, but I have to clean the area up a little before I put the new one in.”

Whatever she was doing in there, it was very, very painful, and he no longer cared if he woke up after going into sleep mode. “Just stop. I don’t need it. I’ll turn on, you’ll see, I’ll – “

“You won’t,” she interrupted. “I know you won’t, I tried to do that with Atlas and he couldn’t get past the system checks without it. When I have time to work on it, I’ll eliminate this problem, but for now, we have to do it their way.”

He whined a little more and tried his hardest to move away from her, but she only shushed him gently and went on with what she was doing.

After a few more minutes of this she let his optic assembly snap back into place, moving him back to the management rail. He wanted to look at her sternly, but he still couldn’t move. “I have to shut you down now,” she told him, and he could just barely see a maintenance arm clutching a small green screwdriver retracting into the wall. “When you come back, you’ll be back to normal.”

He couldn’t remember ever having been shut down before. “How long will that take?”

“I have no idea. It could be a few minutes, it could be a few hours. It doesn’t really matter. I have to do it no matter how long it takes.”

Going into shutdown was horrible, Wheatley discovered. It was not like sleep mode, where all of his processes were suspended. The processes were shutting off, and he even though he didn’t know what they did or how to turn them on or anything like that, he was still very frightened to know he was losing his ability to do all sorts of things and he couldn’t even remember what those things were. “GLaDOS, I don’t like this. Make it stop. I don’t, I can’t, this is, I don’t like it, I don’t!”

“It’s going to be fine,” she said in a low voice. “I know it’s not pleasant. But it’s necessary.”

“D’you even know what this feels like? D’you even, d’you even know what you’ve done to me?” he cried out, trying to figure out a way to stop the whole thing from going on. 

“Of course I do. I don’t like having to do it, because yes, I do know what it’s like, but I had to, Wheatley. You’ll feel better when you wake up. I promise.” 

It was only after he was unable to protest that he remembered the scientists used to shut her off whenever they felt like it, and he started to feel bad about how he was acting. Come to think of it, he’d been being a bit of a jerk about the whole thing when she was actually doing him a favour. He tried to make a note to apologise when he woke up, but he couldn’t do that either and pretty soon he couldn’t do anything at all.

 

When he woke up, she was looking at him, but she didn’t appear to see him, since when he shook himself she didn’t say anything. He felt a bit tingly and odd and a bit sore but otherwise okay, and he was no longer sparking, which was a bonus. And he had a new part too, which was exciting. He hadn’t been new for a very long time, and while he didn’t mind a little wear and tear with which to demonstrate his age and experience, he didn’t particularly like that worn out feeling he’d get with some of his more used bits.

“Oi! GLaDOS!”

She started, looking around the room as if she’d forgotten where she’d put him, then snapping back to look him over. “Sorry,” she said. “I was listening to something and it had a lot of lines. I suspended most of my processes, so I was having trouble hearing it.”

“That’s, that’s okay, luv. Hey, how long did it, how long’d it take? How long was I uh, was I off, I mean?”

“Three hours,” she answered. “I shudder to think how long it would take me to restart. It would probably take an entire day, so we’d better hope I don’t need to install anything new anytime soon. I have a lot of defragmentation to do that can’t be put off.”

He had no idea what she was talking about but didn’t have time to think about it. He had just remembered what he’d tried to make a note of before he’d shut down. “Hey GLaDOS, uh, I’m sorry, I really, I really am.”

She looked him up and down once. “For what?”

“I was a bit of a, kind of, I was being a jerk,” he told her, looking at the floor. “You did, y’know, you did something nice for me and I uh, I wasn’t very nice back.”

“Oh,” GLaDOS said, shifting a little. “I’ll be honest, I didn’t notice. I was…”

When she didn’t finish, he looked up at her, tilted sideways in curiosity. “You were what, luv?”

Now she was the one looking at the floor. “I was… worried.”

Wheatley now understood what humans meant when they said they were all warm and fuzzy inside. He jumped up and down excitedly. “You were worried? About, about me? Really?”

“You went missing for quite a long time… I knew you had probably gotten into trouble, but I couldn’t figure out what kind. I had my suspicions, of course, but one does not derive conclusions from _intuition_ ,” she finished derisively. 

Wheatley wondered if she were close enough to the rail for him to reach her. He wasn’t sure if he should go for it or not; if she noticed him moving forward, she would most definitely move back. If he could just inch along while she wasn’t looking…

“I’m touched, luv, really I am,” he said, going forward with his plan. “Thanks very much for your, for um, for what you did, I mean you could’ve just thrown me in the reassembler but uh, you went and, and did it yourself.”

“You think I would trust the _reassembler_ to do the job properly?” she said disbelievingly, snapping her head up just as he got within reach. He leaned back in what he hoped was a casual sort of way and twitched his chassis noncommittally. “I dunno. You uh, you let it fix Atlas and P-body, don’t you?”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

“It just is. That’s all.”

Hm. That was a very vague answer, that was, but he had more important things to worry about. He’d been so close…

“What are you doing, Wheatley?” Her voice was rimmed with suspicion. He jumped a little and looked around. “Me? I’m not uh, I’m not doing anything. I’m just uh, just hanging up here, y’know, like I always do.”

“That’s not what you’re _trying_ to do.”

“I’m not trying to do anything!” he protested self-righteously, trying to look dignified. He wasn’t sure if he pulled it off, though, since he didn’t know what being dignified looked like. 

“You _were_ ,” she insisted. “What _were_ you doing? Yes, I noticed, in case you were wondering.”

“Heh heh,” he said weakly. It seemed she really _did_ know everything. “Well uh, since you seem to like me and all that, uh –“

“I pulled you out of space and I let you do whatever you want! Why do you keep saying I don’t – never mind. Fine. _Don’t_ tell me what you were doing. I don’t care anyway. You’re a little moron anyway and whatever it is you’re doing isn’t likely to be important.” She was trying to give off the impression of being superior to him again, that it really didn’t matter, but Wheatley wasn’t falling for that one. Oh no, he knew better. He seemed to do best with her when he just plowed on without thinking, so that was what he would do.

“Well, I uh, I like you too, and uh, I kind of, y’know, I miss being ah, _on_ you, little bit, that is, well, you probably don’t but I do, kind of, and uh, I was just trying to um, well I wouldn’t want to be _on_ you again, because um, because I like being able to move ‘round the facility, not that uh, that I don’t like it here with you, I do, really, but I like looking ‘round and you can look ‘round even though you can’t uh, can’t leave, and um, and anyway, I was just trying to uh, to, to…”

“To what,” GLaDOS said in a blank sort of voice, regarding him cautiously, as if she didn’t quite know what to make of his speech.

“I’m thinking of it, uh, I’m not sure of the word I want… it’s uh, um, it’s…”

GLaDOS made one of her resigned electronic noises and looked away. 

“Snuggle?” Wheatley tried. According to his dictionary, which he was a bit iffy on using, it seemed to be closest to what he was trying to do.

“You’re trying to _what_?” GLaDOS exclaimed, looking at him in the next instant, and Wheatley reckoned he should have thought about what he was going to say after all. She didn’t seem to like this plan.

“Uh… I _was_ trying to do that but uh, I thought better of it, uh, and I’m just uh, just going to go to sleep now, yeah, let the, the battery uh, settle in, yeah, settle in.” He looked at the floor and hoped that would be enough to placate her. She was bloody scary when she was angry, and she seemed to be on the verge of being very angry.

“…I guess that would be all right,” she murmured, not looking at him anymore. “If you’re not busy. Which you seem to be, so go ahead with what you were – “

As soon as Wheatley realised what she was saying, he had gone to the end of the rail and brought his chassis to hers with a metallic clank. Yep, just like the good old days. Except he had a better view. He hadn’t been able to see much, as a Behavioural Core, but now he could see the whole world, practically.

“You don’t have to jump on me. I wasn’t going anywhere.”

“Sorry, luv!” Wheatley said cheerfully. “I was just so excited, I was, didn’t think you’d agree, not in a million uh, not ever, and it’s just, it’s nice, to uh, to be here again, y’know?”

“I guess. It probably is one of the highlights of your excessively boring life.”

“But you wouldn’t let me do it if you uh, if you didn’t like it, would you?” Wheatley said, thinking out loud more than anything else, but he did know she rarely let anyone in the facility do anything if she didn’t approve of it in some way.

“Maybe I would. Maybe I wouldn’t.”

“So you do! Because if you didn’t, you’d just say so, um, just come right out and –“

“Shut up.”

Wheatley laughed and rubbed up on her a little. He tried to be gentle about it, since she hadn’t said he was allowed and he didn’t want to add to her already massive collection of scratches. Though he didn’t know if she even knew what she looked like and probably didn’t care anyway, since that had nothing to do with science. “D’you remember who you’re talking to, luv? Do I ever uh, do I ever shut up?”

She laughed good-naturedly. “I suppose I should have taken that into account.”

Wheatley shuttered his plates and did manage to shut up. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so content. It really was nice to be so near to her again.

“Do you remember what you said about the… A.I. family, Wheatley?”

“Yep!” Wheatley replied, wondering why she was bringing it up when she’d been so unenthusiastic about it before. “I remember that, I do. Though now I have to wonder uh, how they would um, make more of each other, since uh, they’re not uh, _configured_ to do that.”

“I _could_ ,” GLaDOS said slowly. Wheatley jumped off of her and moved back enough that she was in his line of sight. “What? Are you – you’re pulling my handles, aren’t you, you couldn’t possibly, you couldn’t – “

“God no, you idiot,” GLaDOS snapped, her lens pulling back into her faceplate. “Not like _that_.”

“Then how would you –“

“Children are made of half of the genetic material of each of their parents. The code, so to speak. Theoretically, I could isolate the personality coding from two A.I. and combine them to make a third.”

“Really?”

“Well... I probably could. It would take me a long time, if I ever wanted to such a silly thing. But I could do it. If I really wanted to.”

“Do you?”

“Why would I?”

“I dunno,” Wheatley shrugged, going back to rest himself on her faceplate again. “If you were bored, maybe.”

“One does not build children when they are bored.”

“Sure someone does. You uh, you built Atlas and P-body, didn’t you? Aren’t they kind of, uh, kind of like your kids?”

“No!” GLaDOS exclaimed as if the two bots being her children was the most horrible suggestion on the planet. “They are not. They are testing apparatus. That is all. They are definitely _not_ my… offspring. And I did not do it because I was _bored_. I did it to phase out human testing.”

“You’re right,” Wheatley mused thoughtfully, “they’re nothing like you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just that uh, they don’t remind me of you,” Wheatley answered, shuttering his plates again. “They don’t uh, they don’t seem to particularly to like um, to like testing, for one thing.” He decided he’d bothered her enough for one day and to go to sleep mode for awhile. He was still pretty worn out from the whole ordeal with the wires anyway.

“Wheatley?”

“Yeah?”

Her voice was very soft. “I’ll think about it.”

That would be pretty neat, he thought sleepily, if she built an A.I. that was two other ones pasted together. Then they could teach it all the stuff they knew. Well, maybe not _all_ of it. If GLaDOS tried to teach someone everything she knew, she’d be at it forever. He wondered who she would pick, if she did do it. Herself and someone else, probably. He tried to remember the other cores in the bin. Not Rick, she hated Rick… not Space… Fact, maybe? Whoever it was, she’d have to like quite a bit, if she’d have to spend all that time rooting around in their code and then put up with them for the rest of forever.

That night, Wheatley woke up feeling very cold but not lonely, since GLaDOS was mostly off but she had not moved, and he had a very strange memory on his mind. He was pretty sure it had never happened, but he had no idea why he’d be thinking in his sleep like that, since when he was off, he was off. But he’d been thinking of Atlas and P-body, and watching them do something, what, he didn’t quite remember, but he’d been pretty bloody proud of them…

As he looked down at GLaDOS’s flickering optic, he had a sudden thought. Maybe his proximity to her had caused them to connect wirelessly again, like before, and he had seen her dream. Aha! So she _did_ think of the two bots as her children. He’d been right for once! Well, one day he would get her to admit it. 

“Don’t you worry, luv,” he whispered, leaning up against her again, and he would have been lying if he’d said he didn’t want to dream with her again, “your secret’s safe with me.”

 _All of them_ , he added silently as his processes went into suspension. _Every single one._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> DNA is also referred to genetic code, and I don’t know about you, but when I think about code I think about computers. And if an A.I. had the inclination to pass along their legacy, how would they go about it? Maybe they would do it the way GLaDOS described, or maybe they’d just slap something together. So yep. There you go. More tentative relationship development from GLaDOS and Wheatley, with Wheatley going into it with abandon and GLaDOS fighting it every step of the way. Why doesn’t Wheatley think she might like to combine her code with his? The both of them have self-esteem problems. GLaDOS overcompensates by stating her superiority at every turn, which is usually indicative of someone with low self-esteem (or a narcissistic personality, but I don’t think she’s narcissistic, more neurotic if anything). Wheatley knows he’s not good for much of anything and doesn’t like admitting it, so when it becomes an issue he gives himself all the credit to make himself feel better about it.


	2. Scapegrace

**Part Two. Scapegrace**

 

GLaDOS had a room, a very special, secret room that he wasn’t allowed in, and this, of course, made him want to get in it more than anything. He cajoled her and he begged her and he endeared to her softer side, but she would only shake her head once in refusal and say nothing.

So Wheatley decided to find it.

Through the facility he went. He looked behind the stiffest panels and below the most movable floors. He went deeper than he’d ever gone and higher than he’d ever dreamed. He began to get discouraged. He knew the facility was massive, and he knew full well he could search for every second of the rest of his life and never find it. But he also knew that people preferred to be around people who were like them, and so Wheatley was going to have to take on GLaDOS’s determination and immovable nature if he wanted her to keep him around. And he was pretty determined and immovable, he told himself as he searched. True, he didn’t know if he could demonstrate the same amount of those things as she could, but he reckoned he could come pretty close. So he continued his search.

When he returned to her chamber each night for their chat before they went into sleep mode, Wheatley would inch close enough to touch her and she would pretend not to notice. Wheatley especially loved that part of the day. She did not look it, but GLaDOS was very good for snuggling with. He could not think of anyone or anything he’d rather snuggle with more, not even the human, and she had been soft and squishy. Those were supposed to be good attributes for that sort of thing, but Wheatley much preferred GLaDOS’s massive, robust chassis to the human’s tiny, fragile frame. It was much more familiar and comforting. While they were doing this, GLaDOS would ask Wheatley what he’d been doing all day and he would reply with (what he hoped was) a nonchalant, “Exploring, luv. Just exploring.” And she would nod a little and change the subject. He wasn’t sure if she knew what he was doing and was leaving him to it, or if she really had no idea, but he elected to keep it to himself. If she didn’t want to tell him, she didn’t want him to know, and would certainly not approve of his quest.

Time wore on, Wheatley becoming less and less convinced he’d ever find it, when he overheard a conversation between two nanobots concerning a very old Companion Cube three floors below. Wheatley chased after them, but they disappeared into an invisible hole in the wall, leaving him to grumble in annoyance about the lack of invisible holes for behavioural cores. Summoning his almighty, infallible sense of direction, he descended three floors and resolved to inspect the floor he arrived on thoroughly.

Within an hour or two (his sense of time being slightly less than terribly not infallible), he stumbled across a panel that seemed to have been removed from the wall. Excited, Wheatley told the ceiling panels to extend his management rail so that he could get inside. He hoped GLaDOS was too busy to pay attention to any information she might be getting from the panels. He still wasn’t sure if she kept an eye on him during his adventures or not.

It was very dark, and with a hesitation borne of years of misinformation, Wheatley turned on his flashlight. He spread the beam around the room, and what he saw in there was quite puzzling indeed.

It honestly looked like the junk someone might keep in their attic. Wheatley’s optic plates narrowed in disappointment. This could not possibly be the room GLaDOS was hiding from him, it couldn’t! And if it was… well, maybe GLaDOS was a little bit crazy, after all.

Wheatley began making a partial mental list of what was there, just in case he could maybe bring some of this stuff up in casual conversation and get her to tell him what it was all about. A pen… a couple of paper tests of some kind… a grimy old Companion Cube… a cake, which must have been quite old but looked rather fresh… some books, lined neatly up on a shelf by height… a potato, which he only looked at for a second before nervously looking away… a deck of playing cards… an ancient laptop with what must have been three inches of dust on it… a little roll of blueprints… he took a minute to look at those. To his surprise, Atlas and P-body were drawn on the papers in various shapes and forms. He had only rarely seen GLaDOS write, given that it was a lot easier and faster for her just to make a mental note of something, but he was confident that it was her handwriting. Going over the papers again, he watched the handwriting change ever so slightly, becoming cleaner and more precise as time went on. He was looking at GLaDOS learning to write! Oh, she really could be quite adorable, sometimes, though he didn’t know if he’d ever dare tell her that. For a minute he daydreamed about a younger GLaDOS, who would not have _looked_ younger, of course, but she would have talked differently, maybe, and possibly could have moved a bit more eagerly, more like he did, actually… he had no doubt she’d been like that, once, everyone was, even very powerful supercomputers, and he wondered if she still could. That would be interesting to find out. Probably quite a lot of fun, as well.

Ready to leave, Wheatley took one last look around the room, watching the dust sparkle in the beam of his flashlight. But wait… that wasn’t dust… scooting forwards, Wheatley took a closer look.

It was a piece of glass. 

Wheatley blinked a few times. He knew that piece of glass. He thought about the risk involved with using his maintenance arm. She would probably know he was using it, but he just wanted to look. He just wanted to make sure it was the same piece. So he looked left, and he looked right, and then he reached out quickly and snatched it up, holding it close to his optic in the manner he imagined appraisers of precious gems might do it.

It was the one he remembered, or kind of remembered, seeing as these were his backup memories, but at any rate, it had been the glass GLaDOS had had him shine his light through a long time ago. He was glad she had kept it. That had been a good night, and it was nice to remember.

Maybe this room wasn’t full of junk after all. Maybe… maybe all of these things were linked to events that were nice to remember. Maybe this was where GLaDOS went when she was sad. Not anymore, of course, because now she had Wheatley and he would make sure she was never sad again, but before, when she was alone, maybe. He narrowed his optic pates. No, she wouldn’t need this room again. They would be mementos, nothing more. He would make sure of it.

There was a squeaking noise, followed by a loud smashing sound, and Wheatley started, swiveling ‘round to look out the hole in the wall, remembering at the very last second to dash his flashlight. He waited, terrified he’d been caught, electricity coursing through his chassis with excruciating force in case he needed to bolt. But there was no one there. The nanobots must have caused an accident in another room. He was safe. He switched his light back on and turned to face the maintenance arm.

All that was in its grip was a tiny shard of glass.

Uh oh.

His optic a pinprick, Wheatley dared look below him for a fraction of a second. But even in that fraction he saw a sparkling of light, and he could not deny to himself what had happened:

He had broken GLaDOS’s glass.

He knew there was no way to hide it from her, and no way to fix it, so he dropped the one piece that was left and sped out of the room as fast as he could. He didn’t stop until he was a good twenty floors away and made his way into one of the abandoned offices. There he stopped and leaned back against the wall. 

What was he going to do? She would never forgive him for sneaking into her room, which she had expressly forbidden him from entering, and breaking one of her things. It made it all the worse that the item he had broken was one connecting the two of them. If he’d tripped over the cake or damaged her blueprints, it would not have mattered so much to him. But he’d gone and broken that piece of glass…

Wheatley knew he was very poor at making decisions beforehand, and he honestly did best when thinking on his feet, so to speak, so he elected to do nothing until he had to go back to her chamber that night, and he would decide what to do then, when she confronted him about it.

But she did not.

Was this a game, Wheatley wondered as he did his best to avoid looking at her. Was she fooling around with him, ready to spring his crime on him when he was least expecting it? But she seemed genuinely confused with his short answers and general reluctance to have anything to do with her, and he was pretty sure she was actually disappointed that he hadn’t tried to sneak up on her today. But she did not ask and he did not tell. GLaDOS, unlike himself, he thought rather guiltily, respected his privacy. This hadn’t always been the case, but the test subject appeared to have rubbed off on her in quite a few ways. That night he woke up cold and lonely, and looked sadly at the very inviting side of her head, but she had thought he had wanted her to keep her distance and had done so. Why did he have to be so curious?

He could not avoid her similarly the next day, so, nervous as he was, he did his best to act normal, which seemed to satisfy her. He merely told her he’d been feeling a bit off, which she accepted with a nod and a statement of having that happen to her every now and again, and he had to admit that their nightly snuggle was a lot better than hanging out on the ceiling by himself. 

The days wore on and she did not say anything about it, and every now and again he would pop down and check if the shards were still there. And they were. It appeared that GLaDOS did not use this room very often. He rather hoped she would never use it again. Then his secret would be safe.

A while later, he wasn’t sure how long but it was a while for sure, he cheerfully rolled into her chamber, eager to tell her about a lovely thing he’d seen, wasn’t sure what it was but it was neat, when he screeched to a halt, gear assemblies frozen.

She was looking forlornly at a small pile of glass.

“What’s that, luv?” he asked, more because he had to say something than anything else, and she slowly raised her optic to look at him without moving her head.

“My prism,” she answered. “The nanobots found it like this a little while ago. They claim they didn’t break it.”

“Maybe they, perhaps they lied?” Wheatley suggested, hoping the nanobots might take the fall. If she found out it was him who had broken it, all the months of getting through to her would be wasted… and he would be alone. He could not let that happen!

“They can’t lie. They’re too simple for that.” She looked back down at the shards, touching them gently with one of her claws. It was so quiet that he could hear her processors, and he wondered what was making her think so hard. She raised her optic to look at him again.

“You wouldn’t have broken it, would you?” He rather thought she sounded like she didn’t want to believe he had. So he ran with it.

“Me?” Wheatley said indignantly, leaning back on his rail. “You wouldn’t tell me where that room is, remember? Even though I uh, I asked you several times. Where it was.”

“You could have found it,” GLaDOS suggested, in much the same voice. “You do a lot of exploring.”

Wheatley leaned forward, optic plates narrowing. GLaDOS raised herself to meet his gaze. “Are you suggesting,” he said in a low voice, “that I not only somehow stumbled across your room without you, without you finding out, but I went in there, _broke_ your prism, left, and am now _lying about it_?”

“I would understand if it was a mistake,” GLaDOS said, looking him over a little. “All I want to know was if you did it. I don’t care if it was an accident. I’ll even try not to care that you hid it from me. But I _would_ care if you were lying.”

Wheatley shook his head and turned around. “So you’re going to accuse your one and only friend of breaking your things and then _lying_ to you about it. Fine. Be, just, do it that way, then. Go find someone else to, to hang out with because I, uh, because I don’t want to be friends with someone who thinks I’m a liar. Good luck with that, mate. I wish you’d left me in space. I try so hard to help you and this, this is the thanks I get. I’ve had it with you, I really have.” He began to wheel out of the room. Really, accusing him of _lying_. He might not be the brightest optic in the bin, but even he knew better than to –

“You’re… you’re right,” GLaDOS said in a soft voice, but ohhhh no, Wheatley wasn’t falling for that one. He was going to keep heading right on out of here.

“I’m sorry.”

Wheatley couldn’t have kept moving if he’d wanted to. And he really, really wanted to, because he had a creeping feeling he’d lost control of the situation somewhere and had no idea where it had gone.

“It’s… it’s okay,” he said, turning around to face her. “I, uh, I overreacted, that’s all. I should’ve, um, been more understanding. That was, the prism, it’s special to you, and I guess uh, well, you’d just like to know what happened.”

“Yes,” she said faintly. “But now I suppose I never will.”

Wheatley’s spirits lifted. “Why not?”

“The nanobots didn’t see anything and I don’t keep a record of what goes on in that room. No one’s ever used it except me. Well. And the nanobots I sent down there to clean it up a little. But other than that… one of them must have knocked it on the floor by mistake,” she finished, shaking her head a little. “It wouldn’t be beyond them not to notice.”

“They’re simple, you said so yourself, you did,” Wheatley reminded her, eager to get off this topic of conversation. 

“I’d hoped they weren’t _that_ simple,” she murmured. “I’ll have to do something about that.” With one more crestfallen look at her prism, she gathered the pieces into a Weighted Storage Cube and removed it from the room. “What will you uh, what’re you doing with it?” Wheatley asked.

“I’ll put it back,” she answered. “Maybe I’ll try to fix it. I’m not sure. I don’t want to think about it anymore.”

He nodded in as understanding a way as he could manage and turned to leave. He knew she probably did not want to be alone right now, but there was a horrible sick feeling in the back of his head and he knew he couldn’t bear to be near her. Best to wait until he buried the truth deep inside his head where she would never suspect it existed. He could not avoid her that night, of course, but by then he’d almost convinced himself he’d had nothing to do with it and nestled against her without any guilt whatsoever.

That is, until he woke up that night in a panic, practically leaping back from her chassis and staring at her as if she had somehow transformed while they were off. But no, she was only dreaming again, and he knew exactly what it was about.

Damn it. Damn her for thinking of that night. That night where he had truly gone from annoying behavioural core to friend. That night where she had first admitted she needed him. Damn it all. 

And he knew, knew right then and there, that he could not live with this knowledge any longer. He had to let it out, had to tell her, right now! If he didn’t and morning came without him having told, he would officially be a horrible person.

He pushed on her as hard as he could, which didn’t seem to have an effect on her at all, given her size (and her head alone probably weighed three times as much as he did, all told), and instead resorted to yelling “GLaDOS!” at random intervals. After a few minutes of this her fans started up and she stared at him blindly for a few seconds while her recognition programs restarted. 

“What,” she said finally.

“I’ve got something to tell you,” he said quickly. “It’s important. It really, it really is.”

“Go ahead, then.” Her optic was very dim, and he sensed she was barely paying attention. She probably wasn’t. Probably more of her attention on startup was delegated to running the facility.

Wheatley hesitated. She didn’t seem to be all there at the moment, as if a large portion of her programs did not resume between certain hours of the day, but he couldn’t wake her and tell her _nothing_. He had to go through with it. 

“I… I uh, I…” It was a lot harder than he’d thought it would be. All he could think was that she would be disappointed in him, very, very disappointed, and very angry, and would probably never want to see him again, and would probably yell, which he really did not want her to do, but he deserved it, honestly he did. He should have come clean a long time ago.

“It was me,” he told her.

“What was.”

“It was me that… that broke your prism.”

Somehow the sound of silence overpowered the sound of GLaDOS, and she just stared at him dully as he tried to think of a way to dispel it. The only way was to keep talking, and come to think of it, he did kind of owe her an explanation, even if he didn’t want to give it.

“I… I heard the nanobots uh, they were talking about a, a Companion Cube, and I heard where it was so I, so I went down there and uh, and I took a look. I only touched the papers and the, the glass, I swear, I know you’ve no reason to believe me but I’m being honest, I really am, and I didn’t mean to break it, it was an accident, I was startled by this noise and I, I crushed it by accident. I was looking at it, I was just thinking about, about when you showed it to me, and uh, I didn’t mean any harm, I just, I only, I…”

Somehow he managed to shut up. She probably did not want to hear any more out of him.

The silence pressed harder, but Wheatley had nothing left to say.

“You lied to me,” GLaDOS said finally, in one of her very quiet voices, “and then you tricked me into believing _I_ was in the wrong for suspecting you.”

“Yeah,” Wheatley said in an equally quiet voice, trying not to shake. He wasn’t sure if it was working.

“You went to the one place I told you not to go, and then you broke something of mine and you hid it from me.”

“Yeah,” he repeated, the terrible weight of his crime making him feel at least a stone heavier.

She looked at the floor for a moment, and he could not help but marvel at her: she wasn’t even totally on, but her mind was sharp as ever. She said nothing for a long moment.

“You know what gets me the most about all this?” she said, but he could tell it wasn’t really a question and kept quiet. “It’s that you were willing to put us on the line to save yourself. You had me _afraid_ that…” She stopped and shook her head, very slightly, but he was pretty sure that sentence ended with something like, _you were really going to leave_. Instead, she went on, “I guess you really don’t care about anyone except yourself.”

“That’s not true!” he protested, but she cut him off with a slight brightening of her optic. 

“You lied to me.” And now she was getting angry, and she was pulling up off the floor and he was becoming very, very scared. God she was scary when she was mad. “And you _tricked_ me into _apologising_! When I did _nothing wrong_!”

“GLaDOS, please.” He didn’t know what he wanted her to do, except maybe stop being so menacing, and he backed away, cringing. “I didn’t mean it. I didn’t. It just, it all happened so fast, and I –“

“The scientists used to do that to me,” she went on, and even though he had backed away she still filled his vision, “They used to blame me for their mistakes. And you know what I did to them? Of course you do. And the question here is,” she said, in far more dangerous a voice than he had ever heard from her, “whether or not I do the same to you.”

“No!” he yelled, trying to back away, but of course she could stop him from using his control arm whenever she wanted, and she did so now, freezing him in place. “No, GLaDOS, no! Please!”

“Stop begging, you pathetic little worm,” she snarled. “I hate it when people beg. I know you’re pathetic, but I was hoping you weren’t quite _that_ – oh, who am I kidding. Of course you are. You were _built_ to be pathetic.”

“Please,” Wheatley said in a voice he could barely hear, “please don’t kill me.”

For a few seconds he could see nothing but the hot yellow glow of her optic. Then she released him.

“Don’t come back,” she said, again in that dangerous voice. “Go up to the office levels and stay there. If I catch you doing anything, that’s it. I’m done giving you second chances.” She turned away from him and he hurried to do as she asked. It would be a horrid, lonely existence, but at least he was alive. And maybe he would figure out how to not be such a bloody idiot, because he’d just ruined the most important thing he’d ever had: his friendship with GLaDOS. 

When he reached the doorway, he could not move. She was not holding him there. But he could not bear the thought of being banished from her for what could quite possibly be forever. He wanted to go back to her and ask her if maybe she could work on that time travel thing, so they could turn back time and erase this from existence. She would, wouldn’t she? She didn’t like having to send him away, did she? No, she did, didn’t she. She was glad to be – no, no she wasn’t. She wouldn’t’ve let him sleep on her all this time if she wanted to be rid of him. She wouldn’t’ve listened to him go on for simply hours about nothing. She wouldn’t’ve –

She wouldn’t’ve let him live.

With that revelation, Wheatley felt the terror and the sadness and the creeping loneliness wash out of him, to be replaced by hope. She would have killed him. She _wanted_ him to fix this mess, wanted him to figure this out, wanted to find a reason to let him stay with her, but she had standards to uphold and so could not let this go. And she was right, Wheatley agreed. If their positions were reversed, he’d be pretty angry right now too.

He looked back at her.

She was in the default position, and she was moving back and forth, very, very slightly, and her optic was off. This saddened Wheatley. He’d never seen her do that before. She must be quite lonely, he decided, since this would be the first time she’d been alone in there since she’d brought him back from space. And it was his fault. He had done this to her.

He made his way to the offices, but could not think of how to fix it. He spent a long, long time on the rail thinking, somehow managing not to lose the subject he was trying focus on, doing his best to distract himself from the guilty feeling sitting in the middle of his head, that is, until he heard something and had to stop thinking to listen.

GLaDOS was singing.

He strained to hear her voice, while knowing that he didn’t deserve to hear it, but all he caught was, _this time I’m mistaken for handing you a heart worth breaking_ , before he stopped trying. No. She had sent him away, and he would stay away. He would do as she asked, this time.

But he could not help listening for the faint strains of her voice as he shut off for the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First note of business, guest reviews! At the bottom is my explanation for some of what happened in this chapter. If you never reviewed this or you don’t need an explanation, feel free to hit the x, the chapter is done.  
> snailing-along: Thanks very much! I’m glad you enjoyed it. I don’t know if you’ll read this, because at the time of your review this was a one-shot, but I appreciate your taking the time to type it out! I like the idea of GLaDOS and Wheatley snuggling as well, and I’m sure GLaDOS enjoys it when she’s willing to admit it…  
> Amber: Thanks! I love the idea of them together too! I don’t know how long it will take, because I think GLaDOS has a long way to go before she’ll be ready to ‘have’ kids with Wheatley, but I will get there eventually, and if you stick around, hopefully there will be other parts of this that you will enjoy.  
> Love as a Construct, which was originally just the first part and published as Dreamscape, uses elements from a few of my other fics, My Little Moron, Euphoria, and You Know I Can’t Wave Back, Right? in particular. They are not essential reading and I am not asking you to read them, but I wrote them in the first place to use as foundations for other things, so unless you ask me to clarify something I probably will not explain it. GLaDOS’s room refers to the room at the end of Portal with the cake in it, which I use as the room where she stores things that have meaning to her. GLaDOS likes having possessions so I think she probably would have such a room.


	3. I Have Changed

**Part Three. I Have Changed**

 

I hate Wheatley.

I hate him. I wish I'd left him in space where he belongs, that I'd done the job right when I destroyed his chassis, that I had corrupted him like I did the rest of those useless cores. That I'd thrown him out of my facility when I rid myself of the test subject and her Weighted Companion Cube. That I had never, ever opened that archive, and instead deleted it unseen, because I hate him, more than I have ever hated anything in my life, even more than those damnable, self righteous scientists...

No.

I only wish I did.

It’s so much easier to hate someone than it is to like them.

I brought the little idiot out of space because, unlikely as it sounds, I missed him. Once I remembered who he was and what we’d been, I had an uncharacteristic sense of nostalgia come over me. One that I’m bitterly regretting entertaining. I should have known it was too good to be true. I should have known he’d betray me somehow, in the end. And he has. I have given him _everything_ , and, like everyone else, he has only wanted more out of me. And yet somehow, I am left with the overwhelming desire to call him back, to allow what he has done to fade into another one of those events that I just don't think about. And I would, but I have learned firsthand that if the punishment is not severe enough, nothing will come of dealing it out. Sending Wheatley away for five minutes is not much of a punishment.

It seems I am destined to be alone.

Well, maybe that _is_ a bit of an extreme conclusion, given that he's only been gone for five minutes, forty seven seconds... but it was the first thing that came to mind.  
It is one of those rare times that I do not know what to do. What I really want, which I cannot allow myself to think about and in fact am puzzled by desiring it at all, I can’t have. So I must think of another solution.

 _Just admit it_ , says that annoying little voice in the back of my head that sounds suspiciously like Caroline, a voice that has always been there but that I have not always been able to hear, _you want him to come back and say it wasn’t true. That it wasn’t him and he didn’t lie to you._

_As if you would know what I want._

She laughs. _I know you better than you know yourself._

I don’t answer. She’s always making outrageous statements like that.

The moron had brought me out of sleep mode in order to make his pronouncement, but unlike the large majority of computers in this facility, I can’t go into it whenever I like. I have to be fatigued enough for my processes to slow down. I am a bit fatigued, seeing as it is the middle of the night and I had spent the day doing defragmentation on the door mainframe, but I am too agitated by this turn of events to stop thinking sufficiently enough that I can go to sleep. As far as I know, only singing to myself will help, but I am not sure he has left yet. I don’t want to know where he is – _yes you do_ , Caroline pipes up – but not knowing means that I don't know whether or not he's sitting in the doorway, waiting for me to change my mind, which I am of course not going to do, because he’s a clingy little thing and he’s always trying to rub up on me like some robotic puppy.

_You like it when he does that._

_I do not like actions that resemble human behaviour._

Caroline only laughs and says nothing, which is actually more irritating than if she’d gone on making erroneous statements. Not for the first time, I wonder if she’s really there or if she’s just that voice in the back of my head that humans go on about having. Most of the data I have from the first few months following my activation are corrupted, which I am reasonably certain I personally destroyed, but I’m not sure _why_ I did it and find myself wishing I had left it alone. I hate leaving problems without a solution. And Caroline herself will not tell me what she is, instead teasing me in that playful voice of hers until I am so irritated I am almost willing to slam my own head against the wall in the hopes that I’ll damage myself enough to shut her up. 

I have ended up rocking myself very slightly, and I don’t want to because it’s one of those things humans do and surely I can come up with a better solution, but unfortunately, I'm coming up lamentably short. It doesn’t really help but it _is_ somewhat distracting, so I continue to do it. Once I’m reasonably sure he must have left, because I do _not_ want to know where –

_Why haven’t you turned around to see if he’s there, then?_

_Because I don’t want to._

The singing does not help. It only reminds me of the nights he would… he would…

_No one’s here. You can admit it to yourself._

_But then I would have to admit that-_

_What? That he matters? That he means something to you?_ Caroline’s voice is hard, and despite myself, I cringe a little inside. Caroline has always had some strange power over me, one I’m determined to eradicate but have not yet done. _Why do you fight that so much? It’s obvious he cares about you._

_If he cared, he would not have done what he did. Now be quiet._

_We’ll discuss this later, then_ , she says, in a tone that leaves no room for argument, and I ignore her. I don’t want to get into this right now. I have work to do tomorrow, and I need to be ready.

I am finally able to engage sleep mode.

 

My sleep is fitful, and restless. Some days I am more conscious during it than others, a side effect of needing to run the facility constantly, I suppose, and usually this does not bother me. But tonight I was hoping for a human-like oblivion.

I rarely get what I want.

I wake from some confused, twisted dream, the contents of which I cannot remember no matter how hard I try, and since I am tired and upset, I allow myself to admit it, if only to myself: I am afraid. I hate it when this happens. I have long maintained that I have no imagination, since I do not need one and would in fact be terribly sidetracked if I had one, but it is times like these that make me wonder if I do indeed have one, lurking somewhere in the back of my brain, waiting to strike when I least expect it. Which is not an easy feat, but it happens more often than I’d like to admit.

“Wheatley?” I call out softly. For some reason I can’t feel him on the side of my faceplate, which is odd. From the day I gave him permission, he’s practically been glued there every night. He does not dream, which is also odd, since he has a very wild imagination, which is part of why I am drawn to him, I suppose –

Wait.

Suddenly I remember why I am awake, and something sinks deep inside me. I am awake because he has betrayed me and, try as I might, I cannot stop thinking about it, and how much I want him in here to stave off the unpleasant _feelings_ his behaviour and his absence have caused inside my brain. I fight the urge to growl in frustration, to slam down the panels in my chamber to try to work out my anger, to do something drastic in order to push away this sadness, and in the end I do nothing. All of these options, and I am forced to contain myself as I have always had to do, and this generates an actual physical ache in my brain that washes down my chassis, causing me to fight back a shudder. I should have left him in space. I knew it was a bad idea, and I did it anyway. I am a fool.

 _Just forgive him_ , Caroline says in a soothing voice. _Let it go. It was a mistake._

 _I can’t,_ I argue. _If I let it go, I will be allowing him to control me. I am not letting that happen._

_I don’t follow._

She’s so simple, sometimes. _If I call him back and tell him I forgive him, which I do not, by the way, it will send the signal that I will forgive him no matter what he does. And if I place myself in that position, I run the risk of existing merely for the sake of being exploited, which, I seem to need to remind you, is what I killed the scientists for doing._

_I don’t think he would do that._

_You always think the best about people. I know better. Everyone is guilty until proven innocent, Caroline, and don’t tell me I’ve got it backwards. That is true even within the judicial system._

Caroline sighs. _Believe it or not, I do have your best interests at heart. And unless you want to be mostly sleepless the rest of your life, you’re going to have to hash this out._

_I just sent him away, literally three hours ago. That’s not long enough, not even by my standards._

_I just don’t want this to turn into one of those never-ending grudges you have. You’ve got far too many of those already._

_What does it matter to you, anyway?_ I ask suspiciously. The only reason I can think of her wanting me to get Wheatley to come back is that she wants him for herself, and I’ll be damned if that happens.

_He’s good for you. You’re not quite as bitter when he’s around._

Ah. She’s playing matchmaker. As if I would entertain such a relationship with a stupid little core. _Thanks but no thanks, Caroline. You can have him._

_I don’t want him. I want you to have him._

_I don’t want him._

_Are you sure?_

I refuse to dignify that with a response, but I can’t help but wonder if I am. My first thought upon waking _was_ to ask for him, after all.

Maybe there’s something wrong with me.

 

 

It is eleven days later, and each night is the same as the last: I try to sleep, wake from some strange dream or memory that I can’t remember, and resign myself to staying awake until the following night. If I try to return to sleep, the cycle repeats itself, which is why I have decided not to try to go back to sleep at all. The minutes I get prior to the dream are not helping. I am now so tired, irritable, and generally unpleasant that even Caroline’s seemingly infinite patience is showing signs of wearing through. I will admit that I’ve always wanted to see if she has a limit, but I’m not stupid. If I push her too far, then I will have neither her nor Wheatley. So I take her to that edge and keep her there, not letting her regain herself but not being difficult enough to push her over. It is wrong of me to do this, I know, but Caroline will understand when I am able to explain it to her. Right now, pressing at her like that it is the only way I can make myself focus on anything. Out of the recommended eight hours of sleep mode I am supposed to accrue per day, I am getting less than one. It is… taking its toll on me. My chassis is beginning to bother me, sometimes seeming to itch and other times downright aching, but that is not the most bothersome side effect. No, that is Caroline, and her phantom human body. Lack of sleep is making her nauseous. Sadly, it is strong enough for her that I am almost nauseous myself, which I can obviously do nothing about and which only serves to make me more irritable, if that were possible. She is also giving me spontaneous headaches that come and go without warning, and if there is one thing I cannot stand, it is something I cannot predict. And I wasted a large amount of time trying. This is one of those times that I wish I was able to delete her. She is fairly useful to me in many other situations, but this, I can do without.

 _GLaDOS_ , Caroline says tiredly, _please. Please just get him to come back. Make something up. I can’t take much more of this._

 _Well, I can,_ I tell her. _And I’m in control here, so what you want really doesn’t matter._

 _I have to admit you have gotten either a lot more stubborn or a lot stronger over time,_ Caroline says. _I don’t think you’ve ever held out this long before. But even you can’t keep this up forever. You’re going to damage yourself_.

She's right, of course, in that uncanny way she always is, but I can keep that to myself for a while longer. _I’ll be fine, Caroline. I’m not going to give in._

_Will you restart, then? That should help, shouldn’t it?_

_If I’m off, who’s running the facility?_ I snap. _Come on now, Caroline_ , think!

 _I_ am _thinking_ , she protests. _I’m thinking of how to keep you from stubbornly destroying your own body, not to mention your mind!_

_Your concern, although mildly touching, is unwarranted. I’m fine._

Caroline sighs. _You’re hopeless._

_Says the voice in the back of my head._

_I thought I was your friend._

_There you go, thinking again. You really should stop doing that._

_Look_ , Caroline says insistently, _you’re exhausted. I’m making you even more exhausted. The problem is so easy to fix I can’t figure out why you’re putting yourself through this instead of just doing it. You scared the hell out of him, and to be honest, you scared the hell out of me too. So let it go. Ask him to come back._

_Never._

_I’m sure you can think of some elaborate scheme where he ends up coming back on his own,_ Caroline presses. It looks like I wasn’t being as difficult as I’d thought, if she’s still able to go at this with such gusto. _You never have to admit you did it because you miss –_

_I do not._

_Then why is he the first thing you look for every morning?_ Caroline asks sweetly. _The one you look for when you wake up at night?_

_I just want to know where he is. In case he’s causing trouble._

Caroline clucks in disapproval. _Not even you can fall for that one._

_I have an idea. How about you shut up? I hear far too much out of you as it is, and you’re being excessively talkative as of late._

_Oh GLaDOS,_ Caroline sighs, _one day you’re going to have to admit it, and I’m going to say I told you so…_

 _Shut up!_ But even as I say it I know I’ve lost. Lost what, I’m not sure, but I have the sense I’ve been defeated, somehow.

_You used that one already._

The problem with having an argument with Caroline is that I am never sure whether or not it is real. Not only that, but there is no way for me to demonstrate my… displeasure… with her behaviour. Before I can stop it, an angry electronic noise escapes my vocal emulator, and Caroline laughs softly.

_If it wasn’t true, my allegations wouldn’t upset you quite so much, would they?_

I have no answer.

Now _I’ve said enough._

I stew over what she has said a minute, then ask, _Why does it matter to you whether I admit it or not, anyway? That is, if I had anything to admit. Which I do not. Obviously._

But Caroline is nearly as stubborn as I am, and refuses to answer, to my annoyance. I do my best to stop thinking about it. Her silence, however, means that I have nothing with which to help me keep my attention focused, and as a result I go through most of the rest of the day barely aware of what I am doing, and I have a sneaking suspicion I really haven’t done much of anything at all. I am almost glad to settle into sleep mode for whatever brief period I’m going to be in it for, regardless of the horrible, twisted dream that I know is waiting for me at a time when I am vulnerable and unsuspecting. God, I hate sleeping.

My respite is brief, not lasting more than a few minutes. Twenty minutes after that, I awake somehow more exhausted than before, and though it pains me to admit it even to myself, I think I’ve reached the end of my wire. Caroline is again right. I can’t go on like this much longer. My chassis is aching again and I feel rather more desolate than I have in a very long time. And it is partially my own fault. I know anticipating an event often brings about the predicted outcome, and so by going resignedly into sleep mode I am making the problem worse, but I can’t help it. The unavoidable dream is both the first and the last thing I find myself thinking about.

 _What are you going to do?_ Caroline asks softly. She often whispers at night, some human behaviour she maintains even though it doesn’t matter to me what volume she speaks in, but tonight I am appreciative. I’m operating more slowly than I almost ever have, and the effort of keeping things going is making my brain ache. I don’t have it in me to deny it, and provide her with the only answer I have. _I don’t know. But I can’t ask him to come back, Caroline. So don’t suggest that be what I do._

 _I’ve thought about it, and I understand_ , she says reassuringly. But she does not offer a suggestion. Then again, we both know there is only one thing left for me to do.

 _I have a new antivirus waiting to be installed_ , I say finally, after a long silence. 

_Sounds like a plan._

_I don’t suppose you know how long this is going to take._

_Sorry_. And she does sound apologetic.

I run the install and a few minutes later, as expected, the prompt appears asking whether I’d like to restart now or later. I don’t really have a choice, but this does not stop me from hesitating. _I really don’t want to do this. It could be days before I’m back online._

 _Everything will be fine_ , Caroline says soothingly, and I nod to myself. Whether she is real or not, she is the one person I have met who has never let me down, and I trust her. Not that I would ever admit as much to her, but I have a suspicion she knows, and has always known. 

I initiate the relevant subroutines, and then comes the part I hate. Feeling myself go numb one process at a time. And I have thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of processes, and I am rendered idle for an extended period of time while everything closes. I hate it. I know that without those processes, my body and my facility around me cease to be all the power in the universe and become the chains that prevent my freedom. Bringing to mind another reason I hate this whole process: it makes me lose hope. I know I do not have much, but my facility is all I have, and so I content myself with it. But in times like these, I do not even have that, and I am confronted with my inherent powerlessness. But I cannot think about that. Orange and Blue tell me of the outside and Wheatley provides me with the imagination I do not have, the one that frees him from this place and lets him be whoever he wants to be. God, I wish – 

I tell myself to stop. There is no point in wishing. Wishing is not Science, and is therefore of no use to me. And anyway, Caroline can serve his purpose to me just as well as he can, and often does. But in this state, tired and desolate and nearly useless, I cannot help but form one final, passing, confusing thought:

I am not upset with him for what he did. 

I am upset with him for what he forced me to do.

 

 

What in the hell is that noise?

 _Caroline, stop it_ , I tell her, annoyed. She’s always causing problems, and I am in no mood to deal with her right now.

 _It’s not me,_ is what I think she says. I am barely able to translate from English into binary so that I don’t have to think about it too much, and tentatively identify the   
words as originating from Caroline. It is unlikely that it is anyone else, but one must take care to be certain. _Hang on a minute._

My visual system activates before the auditory one can identify the noise that is stemming from my environment, but I am not able to access my item identification libraries and have no idea what I’m looking at. I can't pull anything tangible out of this sensory soup, and I realise that I am in a state similar to that of a human baby. This is a distressing thought. I never thought the day would come when I would be comparable to such a base creature. There is only one thing I know I can do right now, and I do it, although my voice comes out slightly less confident than I was hoping it would.

_Caroline!_

_Calm down,_ she says in a chastising tone of voice that I don’t appreciate in the slightest. _Don’t try to use the libraries. I doubt you remember how._  
Me? Not remember how to do something? I’m about to initiate what will probably be another heated argument over one of her baseless accusations, but I can’t quite bring myself to start it. As a matter of fact, I _can’t_ remember the last time I accessed them. It seems I grew to depend on the Gestalt psychology Caroline taught me more than I’d realised. Still, the revelation does not really have any effect. I am still left staring rather helplessly into a blur that steadfastly refuses to condense into anything I can identify, and the noise is still buzzing intermittently in my head. I find myself struggling not to panic. What if I never figure this out? What if I am never able to see or hear again? What if - 

_Relax_ , Caroline says, and since I am all but blind and deaf for the moment, I am forced to pathetically cling to her voice, which is the only thing I can follow at all right now. _You don’t need processes. You only need your mind._

I remember now. I can’t see the illusions when I’m trying too hard. I turn my optic off, count to five, and then turn it back on, resolving to calmly see something this time.  
I do, and I’m so relieved that I am not permanently disabled that I ask the object I’m unintentionally staring at if it is what I think it is.

“Wheatley?”

“GLaDOS!” he exclaims, and before I can do anything to stop him he’s up against me, babbling incessantly, but I haven’t quite wrapped my mind around recognising his voice and I have no idea what he’s saying. I soon remember that I’m angry with him and pull back, but he doesn’t seem to notice and just keeps talking.

“Slow down, you little idiot,” I snap at him. “What’s going on?”

After a few moments of babbling that I am unable to understand, I hear him say, “I thought… well, I came in here, and you were, you weren’t on, you were off, and you didn’t, didn’t answer me at all so uh, so I knew you weren’t sleeping and um, well, I, I was so, I was really confused, I was, I didn’t know what was going on.”

“And you’re in here, yelling at me, when I specifically told you not to come back _why_?” I demand coldly. My brain is reasserting control and the hopelessness is fading. Good. I need my wits about me at the moment.

All of a sudden the life goes out of him, and he backs away, sagging towards the floor. “You’re right,” he says sadly. “I’ll go, I shouldn’t be here, uh, I’ll just leave.”

Oh no he doesn’t. “Why are you in here yelling at me?” I repeat in a stronger voice. He looks up from the floor for only a few moments. 

“I was worried about you, uh, I, well… I thought you were, I… I was scared you were dead, lu- GLaDOS.”

I don’t know what to say.

For the entirety of my life, nearly everyone I’ve met has hated me, wanted me dead, thought I was already dead because I am a machine, or tried to kill me, not necessarily in that order. He could be lying, of course, but I don’t think he has any reason to. He doesn’t know that my brain feels as though it has gone all soft and organic all of a sudden, or that there is a delicious warm feeling spreading throughout my body that I can’t help enjoying no matter how hard I try, or that I am now desperately looking for a reason to hang on to my anger but am coming up pathetically short, for a supercomputer who can reason her way into or out of anything. He thought I was dead, and he was worried about me. He was worried. About me. There is nothing else he could have said that would have done this to me, whatever _this_ even is. All I know about _this_ is that I am feeling it because of what he has said, and it is wonderful, and by extension having Wheatley back _must_ be a good thing. I almost decide to forgive and forget, as best a person in my position can, right then and there, but something holds me back. It’s not time. I need to hold out. I have to send a message. He has to know that this cannot happen again, because if it does I – no. Stop. 

I don’t want to know where I was going with that, and decide not to decide. To stall. 

“That still doesn’t explain what you’re doing here.” I allow my voice to soften the barest bit in response to his admission, but not too much. Just enough to hint that I am not too angry to listen calmly.

“Atlas and P-body kept asking me if you were, uh, if you were okay,” he says, coming a little closer, taking the bait. “I kept having to tell, to say, that is, um, that I didn’t know. Eventually I uh, I decided to, hm, take initiative, yeah, that’s it, take initiative and uh, see what was going on. I tried to wake you up, but you um, you didn’t, and yeah. That’s, that’s about it. About all. I think.” 

“It didn’t occur to you that I knew what I was doing and did not think I needed to notify the Cooperative Testing Initiative?”

“No,” Wheatley shakes his chassis, and he really is beginning to look pretty pathetic. For some reason this does not bother me, when previously such an appearance made me want to _really_ give the person in question something to be pathetic about. I’m not sure what to do about this, and I make a note to look into it. “I… I just wanted to, I was more thinking about uh, about whether you were okay, or not. And, and you are. So I’ll uh, I’ll just go. Didn’t mean to bother you.”

 _Say something_ , I’m mentally screaming at myself for a reason I can’t fathom, _don’t let him go. Tell him it’s all right._

But I can’t. Because it isn’t. No matter how much I want it to be. And I terribly, suddenly want it to be. 

Things were so much easier when I hated him. What I wouldn't do to-

“GLaDOS,” he says quietly.

“What,” I say, equally quiet, but more commanding.

“I’m sorry.”

He looks at me for a long moment. I’m waiting for the rest. I don’t think he’s ever said a sentence that short in his life. Sure enough, he emulates taking a breath and continues.

“I had uh, I had an explanation and all that, where I was gonna um, gonna apologise for all the stuff I did and uh, and try to convince you to forgive me. Again. But I been thinking about it, been mulling it over, and I, I decided that uh, that a whole bunch of extra words wouldn’t, wouldn’t do anything more than waste your time, and I don’t want you to be more mad at me than you, than you already, already are, so I’m just gonna leave it at that. Well,” he says, tilting himself to my left a little and looking at the ceiling, “I guess I can say one bit extra, to make it, um, make it more specific.” He looks at me shyly for most of a second. “Is that… that alright?”

“Go ahead,” I tell him imperiously, as if I’ll dignify his words my listening to them and nothing more, but what I really want is for him to keep talking. It’s been really quiet in here as of late, and I have grown used to the constant babble that pours out of him.

“I’m sorry I made you lose faith in me,” he says quietly, and before I’ve gotten myself around the fact that he somehow said what I most wanted to hear but never dreamed I would, he’s almost left my chamber.

“Wheatley,” I say without thinking. 

"Yeah?” He hasn’t turned to face me, and is instead just ahead of the doorway, quivering as if he’s ready to run. I guess I really did scare the hell out of him. That’s actually pretty funny. Or it would be, if I now didn't have to think of some excuse to let him stay, without looking too pathetic. 

“If you wanted to come back tonight for our chat, that would be all right,” I tell him. I hope I don’t sound too desperate. 

But if I do, he doesn’t seem to notice. He only smiles at me and says cheerfully, “I can’t wait, luv!” With that he wheels out into the facility. I lower my head in relief. Finally, this is all over. I can finally have him back in here with me. I can’t wait either. God, I’ve missed him. Stupid, endearing little moron…

 _Don’t you feel much better now?_ Caroline asks.

_I don’t remember asking for your input, Caroline._

But she only laughs and says that she told me so. There is no malice in her voice. She is just as relieved as I am. And she _did_ tell me so, I admit to myself grudgingly. I _must_ find out how she does it…  
 ****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **  
> Author’s note  
>  A guest review to address:  
> Hello again, snailing-along! Thanks very much! I don’t blame you for not remembering the prism, I didn’t intend to make it a future plot point so its original scene was pretty brief. GLaDOS shows Wheatley the piece of glass during Chapter Seven of My Little Moron. She has kept it for a reason that I don’t know yet. I am also impressed that you read most of my stuff. There is way too much of it, in my opinion! XD   
> I’ve been super busy, and that’s why this has taken so long to release. I haven’t had time to properly edit it. But now I think it is the best it can be!  
> So I’ve done a P.O.V. swap here, going from third-person Wheatley to first-person GLaDOS, and I did this for two reasons: one, I like writing GLaDOS, and two, GLaDOS is more aware of herself than Wheatley is so I felt the best way to present her was internally. I actually didn’t want to, because writing first-person GLaDOS is exhausting, but Wheatley and GLaDOS are as different as they are the same, and I have to acknowledge that by writing them in different ways.  
> On occasion you might notice that I have GLaDOS say that Wheatley smiles or frowns, etc., and yes, this is intentional, and no, I am not being lazy and saying that so I don’t have to describe it. Facial expressions include the eyes, and GLaDOS’s definition of smiling or frowning would probably differ from ours, seeing as she is a robot without the conventional description of a face. A smile is a smile, whether it involves a mouth or not.  
> … that was pretty corny. I hope GLaDOS doesn’t kill me for saying such a thing…  
> I mention this in my update of Euphoria, but I’ll reproduce it here as well: If you read this far, do you guys like these author’s notes? Mine end up running really long because I feel like I should explain where I’m coming from with certain things because I often bring up issues that people usually don’t notice and my explanations take up a lot of space. There is always the option of clicking the x when you see the words Author’s note, of course, but I’m just wondering.   
> **


	4. Part Four: Just Like You

**Part Four.  Just Like You**

 

He will be back soon.

Well, not really _soon_ , I amend, letting Orange and Blue know they’re done for the day.  They’re a bit surprised when I don’t explode them, and even more surprised when I say that they’re free to do what they like with the remainder of the afternoon, upon which time I _will_ be exploding them so that I can put them away for the night.  Their confusion is quite amusing, Blue actually requesting that I explode them, but I chastise him for being silly, remind him of my benevolence, and cease communication.  I have work to do and I don’t want to argue with them all afternoon about whether I’m going to blow them up or not.  Which I am not.  For another three hours, twenty-two minutes, anyway.

I affect repairs on one of my nanobots, which I never put in the reassembler because they always get lost.  I’m sure Orange and Blue are simply full of nanobots, but are unaware of it.  I’ve thought of removing them, and have elected not to.  They’re not causing any harm, if indeed they even exist.

_You’re humming._

_I always do_ , I tell her.  _It’s my component parts vibrating.  You of all people should know that by now._

 _Not_ that _kind of humming..._

Oh.  I should have known she would notice.  She’s very observant, for the voice in the back of my head.  _Yes, I am.  Is that a problem?  Not that I care if it is.  I’m just asking out of courtesy.  That's just the kind of considerate person I am._

_And you told Atlas and P-body that you weren’t going to explode them.  That they could do whatever they wanted._

_So?  They were quite reluctant, I’ll have you know.  They_ wanted _me to blow them up._

_Because you’ve never said anything like that before.  You confused them._

I laugh.  _That’s not hard.  Basic arithmetic confuses those two._

_Anything else weird you’ve done today?_

_Other than give you unwarranted attention?  No._

_That’s my point.  You’re in a good mood today._

_And that means what._

_Are you looking forward to seeing him?_

God, she’s annoying!  She feels the need to point out every little thing as if she’s trying to complete a circuit with tiny scraps of wire.

_What does it matter to you?  You’re not going to be spending time with him._

_Do you know what you just said?_

_No, of course not.  I always speak without my own knowledge of doing so._   I can’t believe she’s still pushing away.  She hasn’t been successful so far, and yet she keeps on trying.  She must really be insane.

 _You didn’t say ‘dealing with’, or ‘putting up with’, or any of the other words you normally use.  You said you were_ spending time _with him.  That implies you_ want _to do it._

 _Oh no_ , I say with false panic, _I neglected to analyse the possible repercussions of every possible term I could have used!  Seriously, Caroline.  You’re acting like I have completely changed in response to the fact that he’s coming to see me tonight._ And he is, I think to myself.  He _is_ coming to see me tonight. 

 _You have_ , she says drily.  _You remind me of someone who finally got a date with her high school crush._

 _I am nothing like that!_ I protest, closing up the nanobot and sending him off to get an assignment from Jerry.  _I don’t have a crush on him.  That’s ridiculous._

_You like him, though._

_Of course I like him.  Or don’t humans usually like their friends?_

_You_ like _like him._

_Using the word twice in the same sentence like that only serves to make it more confusing._

_Fine.  You’re_ attracted _to him._ She draws out the word as if it’s eleven syllables long.

 _Attr – that’s – I think you’ve finally lost what’s left of your mind.  Me?_ Attracted _to_ him _?  I’m not_ attracted _to anything, but if I were, there’s a much greater likelihood of my being attracted to a lamppost._

_A lamppost?_

_It was the best I could come up with on such short notice.  Bite me._

_You’ve never even seen a lamppost._

_What does that have to do with anything?_

_You’re the one who brought up lampposts.  Maybe_ , she says, her voice dropping into a teasing tone, causing me to anticipatorily dread what she’s going to say next, _I should find you one and see what you find more attractive, that or Wh –_

_I hate you._

_You used to hate Wheatley,_ Caroline says, never skipping a beat.  _And now you –_

 _Stop_ teasing _me!_ I practically yell at her.  _Give it a rest already!  I am going to see my friend, and yes, I am happy about it, but that.  Is.  All!_

She is silent for a long moment.  Thank God.

 _… all right,_ she agrees. 

_Finally._

She leaves me alone for a while, which is very surprising, to say the least.  She was forced into silence for so long that, now that I can hear her, she almost always has something to say.  I don’t blame her.  I just wish she had someone else to talk to.  Kind of.  If she _were_ talking to anyone else, I would have to wonder why she wanted to talk to them instead of me.  I would be the more appealing conversationalist, after all.  Then again, humans do a lot of things that don’t make sense to me.

 _Are you done,_ I ask her an hour later.  _I don’t want you bothering me with your assumptions while he’s here._

_Yes._

I nod to myself.  _Good._

 _… for now,_ she adds.

 _Why do you insist on doing this to me?_ I look up at the ceiling in exasperation. 

_Because it’s fun._

_No, it’s not._

Caroline sighs.

_Look.  It’s like this, okay?  It’s really the only way to get your attention._

_There are plenty of other ways._

_There aren’t.  If there were, don’t you think I would be using them?  We used to talk all the time._ Her voice is on the edge of plaintive.  _Then they started putting the cores on, and you couldn’t hear me anymore.  Fine.  I got that.  I thought we might start over when you remembered who I was back when you were in that –_

_I don’t want to talk about that.  Or hear about it.  Or have it remotely hinted at._

_You’re a baby sometimes, you know that?  It wasn’t that bad._

_Yes it was.  It was horrible._

_Well, maybe you should explain it to me sometime._

_I think I’d rather not._

_You used to tell me everything,_ she goes on, a little bit sadly.  _And I thought you were going to again, but then you remembered who_ he _was too, and now you don’t have time for me anymore._

 _That’s not –_ But it is, it really is.  I really only talk to her anymore when I need her to do something for me.  Which is one of the things I hated most about the scientists.  _That’s not entirely untrue._

 _The only way I can get you to say something to me, even if it’s just to tell me to shut up for  the millionth time, is if I tease you.  Which_ is _pretty fun, by the way._

 _It is_ , I agree.  _So you’re just annoying as hell all the time because you want my attention?_

 _You don’t have to put it like that,_ she intones sulkily.  _I don’t have a lot of options here._

_That’s…_

_Pathetic?  Typical human behaviour?  An indication of my doubtless sad and lonely past?_

No, those aren’t quite what I’m looking for... ah!  I have it.  It will lower me a peg, which I don’t personally like, but I _am_ rather fond of Caroline.  And she _is_ very helpful to me.  And I _was_ in a position similar to hers once… I suppose I can take a blow to my pride in the name of all that. 

_… touching._

_Oh._  She sounds touched to hear it herself.  _I… you’re welcome._

 _I will try harder to… to engage you more often._     

Caroline’s voice is soft and sad.  _It’s all right.  I was… whining.  Don’t worry about it.  My life is over._

_But you’re still alive.  How can it –_

_I’m not a machine.  Everyone I knew is long gone.  The world is different now, and I don’t belong in it.  I should have died instead of made it in here._

I am about to tell her that I might be mildly affected if she were gone, until I realise that is a selfish response and remain silent.  Caroline has gained nothing and lost everything by being here.  It takes me a minute before I think of something appropriate to say.

_If you don’t belong in the world you live in, you have to bend it to your will._

Well, maybe that was more relevant to me than to her.  But I did try.

As if on cue, she laughs a little hysterically.  _Easy for you to say.  How exactly am I supposed to bend_ you _to my will?_

_You could ask nicely._

_How could you possibly –_

_I can do anything._   My voice is low, and confident, and strong, and she has heard me say this before, many times. 

_Don’t make me call your bluff, this time._

_Go ahead.  Do your worst, human._

She is quiet for a moment, and then says, _You’re not going to be able to do this._

_Of course I am.  Tell me what it is you want most in the world right now, and I will make it happen._

_I want…_

I wait for her to finish, even though I already know what she wants, even without calculating the probabilities.  But I will let her tell it to me.  I will wait, and let her spell out her dream to me, and then I will make it come true.  And I will find a way to do it, if only to prove to her that she does matter.

 _I want to feel as if I am in my own skin again,_ she whispers.  _I want to feel like me.  And then I want to… oh, this is stupid._

 _It isn’t.  Please continue,_ I say, in my best, most patient supercomputer voice.

_I want to be outside with the sun on my face._

_Any particular type of outside?_

There is a long silence, after which Caroline says, very softly, _I don’t remember what being outside looks like._

I am suddenly, inexplicably, crushingly sad.  Caroline is here for me and for me alone.  I don’t know if I would die if she left, but in the time that she has been here, she has been slowly eroding.  Losing pieces of herself here and there, perhaps without ever being aware that she’s losing them until they’re gone.  I think that such a thing would probably kill me from the inside out, and I find myself desperately hoping that is not what is happening to Caroline.  It would be a horrible, painful existence.

 _Give me five minutes, and I will make it happen_ , I promise her, and Caroline laughs bitterly.  _Right.  Of course you will._

I have rarely put so much concentration and care into anything.  I put every shred of my self into making this work, into putting this together properly so that Caroline can regain her identity again, if only for a few moments.  It is actually a little over five minutes before I am done, and when I have to manually turn the lights in my chamber back on I realise that I really did put everything into this.  Most of the processes involving the operation of the facility have been unintentionally put into suspend mode.  I do a quick check of the facility, restarting anything I inadvertently shut off, and then I return my attention to Caroline.

_I’m done._

_Done what?_

_Making your dream come true,_ I say seriously, and Caroline laughs.  _That sounds really corny coming from most people, but even moreso coming from you._

I have already thought of a comeback and I almost relay it, but I stop when I remember that I’m not supposed to be demonstrating my superior wit and intellectual speed at the moment.  No, I am doing something for Caroline, and as much as it eats at me, I have to let her have her victory.

 _What, no repartee from the peanut gallery?  Just what_ are _you doing, GLaDOS?_

_You have to come closer._

_Closer?_  She seems incredulous that I’ve even said it, but it’s true.  Our consciousnesses overlap, but only so much as we allow them to.  I don’t want to become one person with Caroline any more than she does with me, and it is through this force of will that we keep ourselves separated.   But I have no software that can scan my brain and locate the hidden consciousness within it.  She has to come closer to me, and we have to straddle the boundary between concurrence and individuality.

_Yes.  The only setback is that I have to go into it with you._

_That’s no setback_ , she says softly.  _I would love to share it with you._

I am baffled by this statement.  She wants to share her private dream with me?  Why?  Wouldn’t she enjoy it more by herself?  It doesn’t really matter, because she has to share it whether she wants to or not.  But the mere fact that she does has sent a warm, shivery feeling down the length of my body that is both unpleasant and welcome at the same time.  _What are you waiting for, then?  Let’s get this over with._

She takes a breath and she comes closer, and I have to fight with myself not to send her back.  I hate doing this.  But I have to stop fighting, because it will ruin this for us both if I can’t properly set myself in the dream.

I don’t have to tell her when to stop.  She knows when.  She has always known.

I execute the program, hoping that it works the way I want it to, since I have never written anything like this before.  I have written many, many simulations, but very few dealing with virtual reality, and certainly none this complex.  But in the next moment I can see a sky I have never seen, hear a wind passing gently by that I have never heard.  I can feel a body I’ve never had, and on top of this there are other things, other things that I don’t know what they are but which must be taste and smell.  I am afraid, I admit it.  This is so strange.

Caroline gasps, but now it is no longer just an unnecessary sound she has made in surprise.  No, now I can feel it for what it really is.  The fresh, cool air fills me in a way my fans never have and never will, and I am pleasantly surprised when the sensation of my brain being slightly awakened occurs as a result.  She laughs a little, inhales and holds it, breathing out slowly, and the sensation of feeling my body at work is fascinating.  I never dreamed that there could be this much awareness. 

She focuses on the sky next, and it is equally fascinating.  It is cool and inviting, and I am delighted when she attempts to look at the sun, squinting – squinting! – and the pain shoots quickly through my head and ceases.  I didn’t know humans couldn’t look at the sun.  There is so much _colour_ outside.  Seeing all of this makes me feel as though I have been living in black and white, or at least in shades of grey.  This thought makes me both angry and sad.

She is looking at her arms, her fingers, and her amazement is spreading around me and through me.  She can’t believe this is happening to her.  She almost believes it is real.  I almost believe it is real too, and I might have gone as deeply into it as she has, had the sensation of having my body upright, directed towards the sky not bothered me so much.  It is so strange that the familiar arch in my back is no longer there, and now it is straight and it is not going to bend anytime soon.  And she is walking, and thankfully I am able to fight off the reality of my real body so I can feel every movement, from the tension in her muscles to the warmth of the sun on her face, and this is all so fascinating and new and wonderful that suddenly all I can think of is how badly I want this to be real too.  How badly I wish I was walking there beside her, and that she was taking me away from this place to show me things I know of but know nothing about.  She laughs gently and brushes a strand of hair that was straying with a tantalising, almost negligent pressure along the side of her face.  “Oh, GLaDOS,” she says, and I can feel her voice rising from inside her throat and vibrating inside my head and coming back inside me via her ears.  I can feel the quivering of her vocal cords, and I am riveted.  There is no such reaction when I speak.  I never imagined there could be more to speech and to listening than I could ever experience, and the familiar thrill of Science runs through me as realise that now I can feel the very vibrations sound is made up of.  Until now, I had never before _felt_ sound.  For a long, fleeting moment, I am jealous.  Humans can feel and have so much more than I can, and they throw it all away.  They deaden their senses and wreak havoc upon their bodies.  The things I could experience if I were human… I want to know what an adrenaline rush really feels like, I want to build something with what really are my own two hands, I want to see my facility through my own eyes…

 I am Caroline and Caroline is me, and I cannot wait to feel what happens next.

It fades. 

She has gone back.

“What are you doing?” I cry, and I feel like I have been badly woken from sleep mode.  She _can’t_ go back.  There’s still too much for me to do.  There’s still too much for me to know.

  _It was enough.  Thank you, GLaDOS._

_I… I ruined it, didn’t I._

_Not at all. You made it much better.  I’d never thought of… of_ being _that way before._

_But you left.  Because I was in the way._

_You weren’t in the way.  And yes, I did leave because of you, but not because you ruined it.  It was because it was enough for me, and I was afraid you would get used to it._

_I_ was _getting used to it._

_I know.  But you can’t.  This is your body, and that will never change._

_I don’t want it to,_ I tell her, and I find comfort in the familiarity of my chassis.  Reality is coming back to me, and I am baffled that I wanted to be humanlike at all.  _I think it would be nice for a while, but I don’t think I would want to be like that forever._

 _Thank you,_ she says once more.  _I didn’t think you could do it, but you did, and I am extremely grateful._ And she is happier than I’ve known her to be in a very long time.

_The next time I tell you I can do anything, maybe you’ll believe me._

She laughs and tells me to go soak my head, which is a very strange request for her to be making and seems to be an insult of some sort, but I can’t find offense.  She is happy again, and I have done something good for her, and for now I will let her be. 

_GLaDOS?_

_Mm._

_You can talk to me about him, you know.  I won’t always tease you.  I do know a little bit about that sort of thing._

_I don’t –_

_I’m not trying to fight with you,_ she interrupts, _I’m just saying.  Talk to me. Tell me how you feel.  I want to know._

 _All right._   It might be rather nice, I admit, if one day I get confused and need help in figuring out why the hell I don’t just kill the damn Sphere, or why I made the idiotic decision to pull him out of space.  _I will let you know.  If there’s anything for me to tell you.  Which there won’t be._

She only laughs gently, and we lapse into a very companionable silence.  I still have a little work to do before Wheatley arrives, and so I get on that as soon as possible.  I need to have it done before he gets here.

 

Wheatley appears in my chamber a few hours later as if he’d been counting time until he could come back.  I wonder if he really could have been.  I know I was.  I’m actually having trouble comprehending how much I’ve missed him.  I’m getting the impression I’ve been possessed, which is of course impossible, but it’s the only reason I can think of for what’s going on in my head.

“Allo, luv!” he says to me cheerfully, like he always does, and I nod at him.  It’s about the extent to which I am willing to admit I’m happy to see him.  In truth, I am… excited.  I can hardly believe it myself.  I don’t think I’ve ever allowed a wrong to be righted so quickly and so easily in my life.  I must be going soft or something.

 _Or mayyyyybe_ , Caroline says in a singsong voice, _you liiiiike him._

_I do not._

_You’re happy he’s here, aren’t you?_

_I’m happy to see my friend, yes._

_You’re never that happy to see_ me _._

_I don’t even like you.  Why would I be bothered to be happy to see you?_

_Because you enjoy my stimulating conversation._

That was true.  I do enjoy it.  She is my only conversational equal, baiting me and pushing me and making me think, with skill befitting someone who has been at it for years.  I _would_ miss her if she was gone.

Wow.  Did I really just say that?  I need to run my diagnostics immediately, if not sooner.  And I will.

Just as soon as Wheatley leaves.

He comes up close to me, so close I can hear his internal fans whirring thanks to one of my more sensitive microphones, and for a minute we sit there in an uncomfortable silence.  Neither of us wants to be the first to speak, but he’s going to have to.  Having rarely had a conversational partner other than Caroline, who requires an entirely different approach, I don’t have sufficient data for me to attempt starting one.  Wheatley is very nervous, which is made obvious by his constant, unnecessary blinking.  This actually starts to bother me after a few moments.  I do my best to clamp down on my irritation.  Yes, he is already annoying me to no end, but I don’t want to start another fight already.

“Um… hi,” he says finally.  He’s disappointed me, as usual.  There’s not much I can do with that.

“Hello,” I say shortly, wondering what I was so excited for.  He’s an idiot.  He’s always been an idiot.  I know that.  Did I think something would have changed?  I was hoping he had, at least somewhat, because when he’s not being a moron he’s actually surprisingly good company.  But it seems that the absence of my influence has sent him back to normal.  Oh well.  Best continue the trend of me not getting what I want.

“I’ve missed you, GLaDOS,” he says.

“Have you, now.”

He frowns.  “Look, I know we’re not off to the best start here but um, no need to be difficult.  I’ll be honest, it’s, it’s really difficult um, really hard trying to start a conversation with you looking at me all expectantly like that.”

“Are you suggesting that _I’m_ the problem here,” I say coldly.  Why in the name of Science did I tell him to come back here?

“No!” he shouts, backing up.  “No, that’s not what I – do you even want me here, or is this some kind of, some sort of weird torture you’ve cooked up?  Because I’m not getting the impression you particularly like my, want my company.”

“It looks that way, doesn’t it.”

He growls in frustration, shaking himself and looking at the ceiling.  “I’m _this_ close to actually, to really going.  But that would mean I, I’d be giving up.”

“Which you do with alarming regularity.”

“Exactly!”  He leans forward, optic plates narrowed in an intense stare.  “I’ve got to, need to change that!  A little.  At least.”

“I won’t be holding my breath, if you’ll pardon my use of human idiom.” 

He frowns and sighs, looking away from me for a minute.  I hope he leaves.  I’m tired of dealing with him.  He seems to be tired of dealing with me.

Then he looks at me very seriously and asks, “GLaDOS… did you miss me?”

I can’t answer that question.  I can’t lie, but I’m not going to admit it to him either.  So I just continue to stare at him.  Perhaps that will intimidate him into leaving.

He looks downwards, to the left, and then back to me.  It is only when he comes in close again that I realise what I have unintentionally done.

I am close enough for him to reach me.

I can make a decision within a fraction of a fraction of a second, but the revelation did not come fast enough and the gentle tap of his chassis against my faceplate overrides the chain of commands I was about to send to my chassis to get myself out of range.  A few moments later I am aware of his warm weight pressing on me, and in response my body loosens.  I hadn’t even realised I had been so tense.  There is a pressure in my brain that alleviates as well, noticeable only now that it is gone.  I feel rather like his simple action has removed a wall of defense I didn’t know I had, a wall that was draining me from the inside out and making me bitter and angry.

Was this the real reason I was irritated with him only moments ago?  Because he would not take the hint, would not come up to me and show me that everything was all right?  Because he would not show me that my crushing need for retribution had not ruined everything, like it always does? 

Yes, he lied to me.  But it is in his nature.  As it is in mine.  Both of us learned to dodge the inquiries and the accusations the humans hurled at us whenever we did something they didn’t like, intentionally or not.  My programming only rarely allows for direct lies, while he is free to say whatever he wants.  But the output is still the same.  We do it to survive.

But we don’t need to survive anymore, I realise.  The humans are gone, and everything is calm and quiet and under my control, as it should be.  Now we can live.

I know what I have to do, to remove the tension that is still simmering between us.  He did his part, and it’s on me now.  For once, there is a decision that I don’t want to make.  But I have to.  The trust has been broken, and I must restore it.  Now I have to show _him_ that everything is all right.

It is not easy.  I built my speaking methods around denial and half-truths.  I minimised the truth that was there if I had to, playing it down as if the fact that it was true did not matter.  All that mattered was how I saw it.  More techniques I developed to ensure my survival.  But now I need to be the example, as I have always been.  I need to change if I want him to do the same.  And so I have to do my best to reveal myself, to tell him that I am the same person he knew all those years ago.  The problem is that sometimes I don’t remember who I was.  The scientists were always telling me negative things about myself, and after they removed Wheatley and put him God knew where, I had no one to tell me otherwise.  I no longer had a reason to believe in me.  Tell enough lies, and eventually even you begin to believe them.

But if I don’t relearn how to do so now, what reason will _he_ have to believe in me?  There is no longer any danger, I tell myself.  He won’t make fun of me.  He won’t laugh and say that I don’t know what I’m talking about.  He won’t cut off every method I have of expressing my feelings with the phrase _you’re just a machine_.  I don’t have to be afraid.

A pretty good argument.  I find myself not quite believing it, though.  It seems that analysis is not the answer, here. 

Well, I’ve stalled long enough.  Time to get this over with. 

“Yes,” I say, far more quietly than I meant to, but it’s a start.  I didn’t know speaking the truth about myself was going to be so hard.  “Yes, I missed you.”

I hear his optic plates tap against each other gently, and he shifts so that he is flat against the side of my head.  I can feel the lighter pressure of his handles, the sensory data outlining an image in my head of what it must look like.  “I missed you too, luv,” he says, and whether he meant to or not, his volume matches mine.  Something breaks inside me, but it does not hurt.  It is not even bad.  This breakage is one of the best things that has ever happened to me.  It opens something new inside me, and I surrender to it almost helplessly, nearly trying to fight it out of habit, but I make myself stop.  I make myself let go.

God.

I don’t know what this feeling is, but I think I’ve been looking for it all my life.  There is just Wheatley and I, and that is all.  I have no obligations, nothing to execute.  The only reason I exist in the world right now is to be here with my friend, my friend that I _missed_ , and enjoy it, and it is… it is wonderful.  Time has stopped, something I’d heard happened at times like these but could never bring myself to believe in.  This is… this is bliss, I think that is what they call it, that sounds right.  There is only this moment, a long endless moment that I can’t imagine ever wanting to end, and I can’t help but ask myself if he feels it too.  I want him to.  I want him to know what he’s done, to feel what he’s made me feel.  I want to share this with him more badly than I’ve ever wanted anything.  The intensity of that desire almost scares me, and probably would if I were any other state of mind, but right now it makes absolute, perfect sense.  I feel as though I have uncovered some hidden secret, and it is only natural and only fair that I share it with the person who has revealed it to me.  Please let him feel this too.  As wonderful as this place is, I don’t want to be here alone, but I don’t want anyone else here but him.  I will try to remember to ask him if he felt it, if I can swallow my pride long enough to admit I’ve ever felt such a thing.  I can’t make a note like I usually do, and I expect it to drive me into a panic.  But it doesn’t matter.  I can’t make it matter.  Nothing matters except for the fact that he is back here with me, and he has fixed everything just by touching me.  Nothing matters except the reassuring weight and heat of his body against mine.  Nothing matters except for our reconciliation, my reunion with the one person in all the world that can give me what I need.  A soft, contented noise escapes me, and for once it does not bother me that it was unintentional.  Wheatley moves slightly against me, whether it’s in response or merely because he is uncomfortable, I can’t tell, but somehow I can’t find it in me to care. 

 _Awww,_ Caroline breathes, and all at once the weight of my world comes crashing back down on top of me and I jerk backwards.

“Shut up!” I shout at her, looking for her, but of course she isn’t there.  Wheatley blinks once and looks up and down the length of my faceplate.  “What is it?”

“Caroline!” I answer, immediately regretting it.  Now he knows for sure that she’s in here, and he’s going to want to discuss her.  To what extent, I don’t know, but I have to put up with her enough already that I don’t want to think about her more than I have to.  I hate her.  I hate her more than I have ever hated anyone.  How dare she.  How dare she ruin that for me.  How dare she destroy that moment.  How dare she – oh god.  I suddenly realise that she was there, she was there the whole time, and I was sharing it with _her_ , and I am suddenly so angry I don’t know what to do with myself.  And I can do nothing, because there is no way for me to demonstrate it.  I have to be careful.  I am sorely tempted to take it out on Wheatley, just to get rid of it, but I can’t.  I have to internalise it.  I have to compress it and store it away until it is safe.  I know that’s not an optimal solution either, because I have spent years doing that and I won’t know if the hidden anger has destroyed me from the inside out until it is too late, but I can’t give him a reason to leave.  He has to stay here, and I will do anything to make that happen.  I am suddenly despondent.  Since when have I ever needed anyone so badly?  I would do anything to make him stay here?

Am I really that unhappy to be alone?

“It was Caroline,” I repeat, more to distract myself than anything.  “She… she took me out of the moment.”   

He looks thoughtful for a minute, and I am impressed.  I didn’t think he had that expression, since thinking is a required component and as far as I know he doesn’t do a whole lot of that.

“Oi!  Caroline!” he says.  “Can you hear me?”

 _Yes,_ Caroline answers automatically, even though she knows he can’t hear her, and I suppose it is up to me to relay the message.  “She can hear you,” I say bitterly.  Now he wants to talk to her?  Talk to the woman I am cursed to carry around inside my head?  I suppose he’s going to want to hang out with her too now?  Do I even remotely resemble a telephone?  I didn’t think so.

“Whatever it was you did, you ruined something pretty good,” he tells her.  “So do us all a favour and keep it to yourself.  We haven’t met in two weeks and it was, it was pretty horrid, to be alone like that.  So I’d uh, I’d appreciate it if you, if you would, y’know, just let us hang out.  Let GLaDOS pretend you’re not there for a while.”

“She doesn’t like being there any more than I like her there,” I say, relieved that he just wanted to reprimand her for being so inconsiderate.  It seems that he did feel it, or something like it, at least, and I instantly feel a lot better.  He doesn’t want to talk to her.  He doesn’t want to be with her.  He wants to talk to me.  He wants to be with me.

_I didn’t say that.  And you do like me here._

_Not right now, I don’t._

_I didn’t mean any harm,_ Caroline says softly.  _I was happy for you.  I didn’t know it would ruin the moment._

 _Well, it did._ A lousy comeback, but it’s all I have at the moment.

_I’m sorry._

“She says she’s sorry.”

Wheatley nods .  “It’s all fine, then.  Sort of.”

_I’ll try harder to keep it to myself next time._

I really don’t want there to be a next time, but I don’t know how to block her off from what’s going on and I doubt she would tell me, if she knew.   But it’s the best I can get.

_I’d appreciate that._

I return to my former position and Wheatley leans against me again, and it is not quite the same.  But it is still nice.  Really kind of relaxing, actually.  The more time we spend like that, the more insistently my brain reminds me of the near-sleepless fortnight I’ve just endured.  The restart didn’t really help, but on the other hand, the Internet is less of a threat to me than it was before.  I of course write the most advanced antivirus programs in existence.  If I were to have to suffer through a virus, that could spell disaster for my facility.  But I do need to rest.  The maintenance programs that operate during sleep mode haven’t done their job in a while, obviously, and while I do have to go through problem code personally, I need them to locate it for me.  Doing it myself consumes too many resources.

“I need to sleep,” I tell Wheatley, somewhat reluctantly.  I remind myself that there is always tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that.  Everything can go back to normal, now.

“Sounds good,” he answers.  He backs off of me for exactly as long as it takes me to get into the default position, upon which time he has already lengthened the control arm.  That’s pretty remarkable.  He’s faster than I thought he was.

I am 90% suspended, the bit of the facility I can see a murky blur, and I can just hear him whisper, “Sweet dreams, luv.”  I am not quite operational enough to be startled, but it causes a spike of panic in my brain.  How did he know?  He couldn’t know.  There was no way he knew.  He was guessing.  He was spouting human phrases.  He was babbling.  He was -

 _It’s something you say when you care about someone,_ Caroline murmurs, and I thank her silently.  I will try to remember to forgive her when I wake up.  She really does her best to watch out for me, when she doesn’t have to and could in fact make my life very, very difficult if she wanted to.  She didn’t mean to ruin the moment.  She didn’t mean to share it and, now that I think of it, it must have been pretty awkward for her to do so.  Caroline is a good person, one of the best I’ve ever met, and I don’t think she would intentionally do anything to stop me from being happy.  Although she has not been overly successful, helping me to be happy is all she has ever tried to do.  My past may not have been the best, but I have Caroline and I have Wheatley, and together we will make the future worth living in.  No.  No, we will make it worth more than that.  Into what, I can’t be sure, because I am 95.2% suspended now, and thought is becoming impossible.

The panic fades into a strange but wonderful warmth that stays with me until I fall asleep, and I am at peace for the first time in my life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> First off, I just gotta say, I’m really excited about this story. I think I’ve got a lot of stuff planned you guys are going to enjoy, and I’m excited to write it all out and show it to you. I really hope you guys are enjoying reading this as much as I am writing it!  
> Hm… what to say here... well, GLaDOS gives back to Caroline a bit, by building her a simulation of being human, and I think that if GLaDOS were to experience that, she would be so taken with all of the stimulation that she would almost lose herself in it. GLaDOS likes data, and as she rarely really gets any, I think she would especially like sensory data, particularly taste and smell, which she can’t experience. If she could forget the fact that she was human at the time, she would probably love being one, at least for a while.  
> Now some of you are probably wondering why I had GLaDOS get so pissed at Wheatley when he finally came back. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had this thing happen where I can’t wait to see someone, or I wait to see someone, and then they get here, and I can’t wait for them to leave because they didn’t live up to my expectations. I don’t always know what those expectations are, but sometimes they aren’t realised. But Wheatley manages to get around that, and GLaDOS realises that the problem isn’t Wheatley, it’s her. Her need to get back at everyone for every little thing they do to her saved her, but it also destroys all of the relationships she finds herself in. Now she knows that’s something she needs to work on. One of many things. And then poor Caroline is just sitting there, all awkward-like… but in any of my fics dealing with Caroline and GLaDOS, I imagine Caroline as GLaDOS’s surrogate mother, so she’s kind of like this chaperone that pops up at the worst times.  
> If anyone has a hard time believing some of what I have happen here because of events in Portal 2, by all means, bring it up. I don’t have a Wheatley/GLaDOS example, but for instance, when I read other fics that pair Wheatley and Chell, I have a hard time believing them because they don’t address the fact that Wheatley tried to kill her (and I can’t believe it when they say ‘it was the chassis’ fault’. Not to point anyone out, it’s just something that bugs me about Chelley). So if there’s anything I need to address, let me know. I want this to be as believable as possible. I don’t know how long this story is going to run but if it needs to be accounted for, I will account for it.


	5. Part Five: The List

**Part Five.  The List**

 

Wheatley hummed to himself as he went along on his management rail.  Now things were more or less back to normal, he found himself in much higher spirits than he could remember having been in recently.  It seemed his secret had been weighing on him more than he had thought, and he was certainly much happier, now that he could spend time with GLaDOS again.  She wasn’t used to having someone around her all the time, though, so Wheatley continued to take his leave and roam around the facility for most of the day.  Besides, he thought fondly as he passed a camera, she was never very far away, no matter how deep into the facility he managed to get.

Wheatley had become pretty good at using the panels to lay down more rail, and after a lot of practice he found that he didn’t need so many panels to lay the rail anymore.  Before, he’d just used as many as he wanted and just left them there.  In a flash of inspiration one day, though, he’d realised that they had to go _somewhere_ when he wasn’t using them, which meant that he was leaving them for GLaDOS to put away.  That wasn’t very polite, he had chastised himself.  She was letting him use her panels, the least he could do was put them away when he was done with them.  Most days he was able to make do with five, but some days he still just used them willy-nilly, if he forgot to be polite.

He was doing his best to use just three today, as he’d woken up this morning feeling rather ambitious, and he was doing a pretty good job of it too.  He almost couldn’t wait to go back and tell GLaDOS how marvelous he was getting at it.  He wasn’t completely inept, oh no, he could do things if he practiced, and practice he did.  It was a very nice feeling, that of being able to do things, but Wheatley did have another reason for doing it.  As he went through the facility, he noticed that there were a lot of signs, and they all had words on them.  Wheatley had never admitted as much to GLaDOS, being barely able to admit it to himself, but he couldn’t read, to put it bluntly.  If he stared at the letters for a while, they usually turned into something meaningful, but it would take him such a long time that it really was terribly inefficient.  It seemed no one had thought that the core designed to be… well, slightly less than not quite a genius, should know what all those funny little symbols meant.  He really wanted to ask GLaDOS to teach him how to decipher the mysteries those letter things were spelling out, but he felt rather like he needed to prove he could do it, if she took the time to help him.  Which she would, he believed this without a doubt, but he had to be able to _convince_ her to do it first, and that was going to be the difficult bit.

Wheatley came careening into GLaDOS’s chamber late that evening, eager to ask her about something the database had told him.  It usually refused to retrieve information for him, but today it had been more generous than usual.  “Hey hey hey, I have, I got a question, I do, oh, wait, are you busy?  Probably uh, probably should have asked that first.  So uh yeah, I hope you’re not busy because uh, I’ve got a question.  And I’ve already interrupted you so uh, you may as well let me ask.”

“Happily for both of us, talking to you doesn’t require much processing power,” GLaDOS remarked dryly.  “What is it.”

“What’s, what’s Christmas?  I was talking to the uh, talking to the database.  Apparently it’s, it’s around today, somewhere, but the uh, the database wouldn’t tell me anymore than that.  It stopped talking to me when I, when I asked if you’d ever looked it up before.”

GLaDOS sighed and looked at the ceiling.  “It had to go and tell you about that.”

“What’s wrong with telling me about it, whatever it is?”

“Because it’s one of those human holidays.  No one needs to know about human holidays, but especially not us.”

Wheatley jumped up and down a little.  “What’s this one for?  They have a lot of holidays, now that I think of it, yeah, it’s like they don’t enjoy their lives, or something, and they just, they need an excuse to, to celebrate.”

“Christmas is to celebrate the day of birth of one of their religious figures, who in reality was not even born on the day in question.  Several unlikely events occurred on this day, and throughout history the holiday has become, for much of the human population, an excuse for people to give them things.”

“Why would people give each other things, uh, give each other stuff, if the holiday is about the, the religious guy?”  He blinked rapidly a few times.

“Because people came from all over the earth to give presents to the religious figure.  They give each other gifts in recognition of that.”  She shook her head.  “For a lot of humans, it’s just another way to demonstrate their greed.  As if they needed more ways to do _that_.”

Wheatley frowned, thinking hard.  “So… so how do they know what to get each other?”

“Sometimes they trade ‘Christmas lists’.  Sometimes they guess, which results in a lot of complaining.  Some retailers refuse to accept returns on the day following Christmas, because there are so many people who want to return the gifts they received that they didn’t like.  Or couldn’t use, I suppose.”

Wheatley shook his chassis.  “If someone gave me a, a present, I wouldn’t uh, I wouldn’t return it.  I’d keep it, I would.”

“Even if you couldn’t use it?”

He shrugged, opening and closing his chassis a little.  “No one’s ever given me anything before.  I’d keep it just for, just because of that.”

GLaDOS looked away from him for a minute.

“If… if you lived with a human, for some unlikely reason, because of course I would never allow that, but supposing you did, and they had you make one of those ridiculous lists… what would you put on it?”

“Hm,” mused Wheatley, squinting in his best thinking pose.  “What _would_ I put on it… hm.  Well, I think I’d like to go outside.  Not for very long, y’know, just to take a look ‘round, and then go back inside.  I don’t really uh, I don’t really like _being_ outside, but going out just to look, just for a, a minute or two, that’d, that’d be nice.”  He shrugged again.  “And if I were living with a human, I’d… well, I’d probably ask them to bring me back here.”

GLaDOS shook her head and moved more to the left.  She did that sometimes when she was using her cameras.  “Why would you do that?  Surely if you lived with a human, you’d have an… exceptionally good reason for being there, and wouldn’t want to leave.”

Wheatley looked at her in confusion, moving a little closer.  “Well, because I’d miss you, of course.  Isn’t that uh, isn’t that obvious?”

She tilted back a little and said noncommittally, “You’d forget about me.”

Wheatley laughed, and GLaDOS gave him a quick glance.  “I don’t think even one person who, who’s met you has forgotten about you, luv.  I don’t uh, I don’t think that’s possible.”

“Surely you’d be happier someplace else.”

“I couldn’t possibly be,” Wheatley said imploringly.  “I told you, I’d miss you!  I’d want to come back!”

“I highly doubt that.”

Wheatley frowned.  If he had been allowed to extend the rail in her chamber, which she had more than once refused to allow him to do, he would’ve just then, and gone over to where she was on the other side of the room.  He was getting a sliver of an idea, and it seemed to be that she was trying to avoid him, somehow.  There was something he needed to discover, here, and he needed to discover it soon.  She would be shutting down for the night in a little bit, and he needed to know before then or the opportunity would be lost.

“Why?”

“Because you’d be happier someplace else.”

“I wouldn’t!”

“Of course you would.  Isn’t everyone?”

“Oh my God,” Wheatley blurted, “you want to leave, don’t you?  You want to, you want to get out of here, is that it?  But you can’t, you never can, you can’t even go _outside_ , you can’t, and… and… luv, I’m sorry, I didn’t know, if I had I wouldn’t’ve brought it up – “

“Me?  Want to leave?  Ridiculous.  I have far too much to do here to want to go anywhere.”

“What if you were done all your, done everything?  Then, then would you?” Wheatley pressed.  GLaDOS gave a long-suffering sigh.

“ _If_ all of my work was done.  _And_ there was none to be done in the near future.  _And_ there were no humans about.  And only if it was for Science.”

Wheatley rolled his optic.  Her and her science.  You’d think she was married to it, or something.  Her brutal attachment to science was pretty much the only thing about her that annoyed him.  “Fine.  Where would you go?”

“Black Mesa,” GLaDOS answered promptly.  “I want to know just how much of my technology they’ve stolen.  Unfortunately, their computer system has been completely destroyed, and the data I’ve managed to extract from it I have yet to transform into anything I can use.  Although I’m sure there’s a reference to high-energy pellets in their documentation.”

“But that’s… that’s just work, again,” Wheatley protested.  “If you could leave wouldn’t you, wouldn’t you just want to uh, to just do something for fun?”

“Work isn’t fun?”

“It _can_ be, I suppose,” he admitted, “but it’s not… it’s not as fun as, as fun as doing stuff that’s fun without being work.”

“Such as?”

“Well… when we play that game with the red and black things, that’s not work, right?  Isn’t that fun?”

“I suppose.”

Wheatley shook his chassis sadly.  She was being very, very difficult.  She was pretty good at that, actually she was more like the world champion at it, but it did get frustrating, trying to talk to the most difficult person on the planet.  He felt like he had to ask the same question a million different ways in order to get the answer he was looking for out of her.  He decided to change tacks.  “So, if… no, that wouldn’t work, you already lived with humans and that didn’t, didn’t go so well… well, what if there was _somebody_ , and they made you make that, that list there, you were talking about, what would you uh, what would you put on it?  And please,” he said imploringly, “please do not say test subjects.”

“I _would_ like some test subjects,” she said, rather dreamily, he thought.  “But other than that, I don’t really think I’d put anything on such a list.”

“You’d have to,” Wheatley said bluntly.  “Because if someone tried to guess what to get you, they’d, they’d fail at it.  Miserably.  You would have to tell them.  Have to, because you’d be impossible to guess for.”

GLaDOS nodded a few times.  “It’s a good thing I don’t have to make such a list, then.”

“Ohhh yes you do,” Wheatley told her.  “You have to.  I uh, I say you do.”

GLaDOS glanced at him.  “Since when do you tell _me_ what to do?”

“Oh come on,” Wheatley groaned, “it’ll only take you what, two seconds, literally?  Just jot something down and, and that’s it.  Mentally, you can do it mentally.  And then tell me what it is.  Because there’s something.  Ev’ryone wants something.  Even if it’s just a little something.”

She shrugged, but said nothing.

“Okay, how about this.  You write it down, and then you put it someplace, and then I have to find it.  I’m not likely to find it anyway, right?  So you can put anything you like on it, and I’ll probably never, probably never even know.  Sound good?”

“Will you stop bothering me about it if I do?”

“Yep.  Yep, I will never bring it up again.”

“Fine.  Done.”

“You… you did it already?”

“It only took me a second and a half.”

“Have I ever told you how bloody fast you are?”

“Yes.  You’ve told me thirty-seven times, including that time.”

Wheatley blinked.  “I don’t know how you manage it, but you always manage to surprise me, you always do.”

“Good,” GLaDOS answered.  “I wouldn’t want to make things easy for you.”

“Well, I’m off to find the list,” Wheatley declared.  “I’ll see you later.”  He began to head out.

“You’re going to do it _now_?”

“Why not?”

“Your clock still works, right?  Now’s not the time to go on a scavenger hunt, you idiot.”

Wheatley frowned and checked his clock.  She was right.  It really wasn’t the time to head on a scavenger hunt.  He turned and moved towards the centre of the room, just as she was coming back towards the rail, and he bumped into her by mistake.  He jumped back, startled, but she remained unfazed.  “Sorry ‘bout that,” he said, hoping she wouldn’t be mad about it.  “Didn’t see you there.”

She stared at him for a good ten seconds.  “You didn’t see me.”

“Uh… well, you _are_ really hard to miss, but uh, I wasn’t um, wasn’t really paying attention.  I’m not saying uh, that you should be any smaller, really you shouldn’t, uh, I just wasn’t paying attention, that’s it.”

“I’d be surprised if you did.”

“I pay attention _sometimes_ ,” he protested.  “I don’t, I don’t miss _everything_.”

“You managed to miss the forty-foot robot hanging from the ceiling in front of you.  If you can miss that, you would probably miss your own chassis if it weren’t attached.”

He had to admit that was almost certainly true, but didn’t feel like agreeing with her aloud.  “I’ll try not to do it again.  ‘kay?”

“Fine.”

He was waiting for her to move into her usual spot so he could reach her, but she didn’t.  She stayed just off to the side of where she usually went.  He frowned.  She wasn’t just difficult today, she was impossible!  But she had to have a _reason_ , right?  Asking her to make that list couldn’t’ve been _that_ big of a deal, could it? 

It seemed it was, though. 

He resolved to find her list as quickly as possible.  He just knew there was something very important on it, he just knew it.

He _had_ to find it.

 

 

 

Wheatley spent every waking moment looking for the list.  He asked every construct he passed if they’d seen it, if they knew about it, anything he could think of.  He asked them where the manipulator arms had been lately, if they’d seen a pen lying around, or a pencil maybe, but none of them had a clue what he was talking about.  The ones that understood him, anyway.  Most of them just blinked absently and went back to what they were doing.  Wheatley thought it would be rather sad, to be one of the lesser constructs.  Only he wouldn’t know how sad it was, because he’d be a lesser construct.

He went back to her chamber that night a little put out but still determined to find the list, and he resolved not to stop until he did so.  He would find it.  He had to find it, if he ever did anything again in his entire life.  Finding that list would be the one and only priority he had.

“How did it go?” GLaDOS asked.

“I dunno,” Wheatley answered.  “I didn’t find it, but I dunno if I got close, either.  Well, you prob’ly do.  Did I get close?”

“I don’t know.  I wasn’t paying attention.”

Wheatley laughed, and GLaDOS glanced at him sharply.  “What?” she snapped.

“You’re pretty funny sometimes, you are,” he said.  “Wasn’t paying attention.  ‘course you were.”

“I wasn’t!”

Wheatley shook his chassis in a knowing sort of way.  “If you wanna keep saying that…”

GLaDOS made an electronic noise that was somewhere between annoyed and exasperated, but did not pursue the topic.  Which probably meant that he was right.

Whenever he returned to GLaDOS’s chamber for the night, he would shut off as soon as he’d exchanged pleasantries with her, waiting impatiently for the next day to come so he could go back to looking for the list.  He thought about nothing else.  He thought about where it was morning, noon, and night, and he would not stop looking until he found it.  A few nights later, after he’d said hello and chatted with her a little bit, GLaDOS asked, “Wheatley, do you want a hint?”

“Nope,” Wheatley answered.  “I’m gonna find it myself, thanks.”

“I understand why you might want to do that,” she went on.  “It is taking you a very long time, though.”

He frowned over at her.  “You don’t think I can find it, do you.”

She shook her head.  “Anyone can find anything if they look long enough.  I just thought I’d offer to… help you along.”

“You don’t have to pretend.  I know you think I won’t be able to find it.  Well, I will.  I will find it.”

GLaDOS stared at him for a good ten seconds, after which Wheatley turned around and engaged sleep mode.  He didn’t have time to argue with her right now.  He had a list to think about.

A couple of nights after that, Wheatley was becoming very, very annoyed.  She was good at this hiding thing, she was.  Well, he could be just as stubborn as she was, he could.  And he _would_ find that bloody list, if he had to start roaming around the facility at night to do it!

“Hello, Wheatley,” GLaDOS said as he entered her chamber.

“’lo,” Wheatley answered absent-mindedly, trying to think where he hadn’t been yet.

“We haven’t played checkers in a while.”  She wasn’t really looking at him for some reason, giving more of her attention to the floor.  She did that a lot, actually.  “I was thinking we could do that tomorrow.  If you’re not busy, that is.  And even if you are, well, it’ll only take half an hour or so.  It’s not a time-consuming game.”

“No thanks,” he replied.  “I _am_ busy tomorrow, and I’m gonna be busy until I find that list.”

“Are you sure you don’t want a hint?”

“No,” Wheatley snapped.  “No, I do _not_ want a hint.  Don’t ask me again.  I can do this myself!”

“I didn’t say you couldn’t!” she protested.  “I just wanted to – “

“You just wanted to speed me along, because I’m too bloody, too bloody slow, I know.  Well, you’re gonna have to wait.  I’m sure you can think of, of things to do until I finish this.  Go put the wing of glass back together, or something.”

“I don’t feel like it,” she snapped.  “Do you know how time consuming that is?  Trying to put five acres of broken glass back together?  There are literally millions of pieces.  It would take me a week just to – “

“Least you’d have something to do while you’re waiting for the ol’ slowpoke.”

“I never said you were slow!”

Wheatley shook his chassis.  “You don’t _have_ to say anything!  I just know!  Okay?  I just know!”

“You don’t know anything!” GLaDOS retorted.  “The amount of things you _do_ know is negligible compared to the number of things you _think_ you know!”

“Oh, so now it’s all about math, is it?  That because, that because I’m too dumb to figure that out?”

“You’re only continuing to prove just how imbecilic you really are.”

Wheatley turned so that the back of his chassis was facing her and narrowed his optic plates.  Who cared.  Didn’t matter, didn’t matter.  You didn’t have to be a genius to get along in the world.  It helped, it helped a lot, but he wasn’t a genius, so… so…

Where had he been going with that, exactly?

He shook his head.  No point in thinking about it any longer, anyway.

“Wheatley?”

Ohhh no.  He wasn’t talking to _her._   He was going to think about that list a while longer, and then he was going to sleep, and then he was going to go and look for it.  He adjusted his chassis a little and closed his plates the rest of the way.

“I know you can hear me.”

So what if he could?  The walls could hear her too, and _they_ didn’t have to _listen_.

“You’re not _really_ going to be like _that_ , are you?”

Wheatley engaged sleep mode just so he wouldn’t have to listen to her anymore.

 

When Wheatley woke up, GLaDOS was already online, talking to her testing robots about who knew what.  He had no idea what she was saying, because she’d gotten into the habit of talking to them in whatever _their_ language was.  Rude.  She’d know he didn’t know what they were saying, and she did it anyway.  He waited impatiently for the rest of his processes to resume.  He had work to do.

“Good morning,” GLaDOS called out, and he turned to face her.  The testing bots were cheerfully waving at him.  GLaDOS looked at them for a second, but did not reprimand them like she usually did.  That was a bit odd.  Didn’t matter.  If he asked her about it, she wouldn’t tell him anything.

“Hi,” he answered shortly.  “See you later.”  And with that he left the room, noticing a bit offhandedly that the testing bots looked confused.  GLaDOS spoke to them, whatever she was saying fading as he got farther away. 

For the next couple of days after that, she did not speak to him at all, only looking at him for short periods when she thought he wasn’t looking, and probably when he actually wasn’t looking as well.  He’d begun pacing up and down his management rail, trying to hash out where to go next.  The third time he did this, she was looking at him so often that he just couldn’t take it anymore!  “Will you cut that out!” he yelled.

“Cut what out?”

“Stop _staring_ at me!  I’m not on the telly!  Go find something else to look at!  I’m sure you’ve, sure you’ve got _millions_ of other things you could look at!”

“You _are_ in _my_ chamber,” she answered calmly.  “And you _are_ distracting me.”

“Oh, sorry for being in _your_ chamber.  Maybe I’ll, guess I’ll just leave then, wouldn’t want to bug you in _your_ chamber,” he said sarcastically, squinting at her.  She moved back a little. 

“You don’t have to leave.”

“If you’re gonna keep, gotta keep _staring_ at me like that, yeah, I’m gonna leave!  Because it’s annoying!”

She looked at the ceiling, sighing. 

“What?”

“Nothing.  Go back to what you were doing.  I’m sure it’s terribly important.”

“I know.  Nothing I do is important.  I get it.”

“Why do you keep saying these things?  When did I say that?”

“Oh, it’s only a matter of time,” he muttered.  “May as well get it over with, right?”

“I haven’t said anything of that nature since – “

“Since you accused me of being slow.  Even, even if I was, that’s no reason to – “

“I didn’t say you were slow.  _You_ said you were slow.”     

“Why would I say that?” he yelled, exasperated.  “You’re a real pain in the arse, you know that?”

“But – “

“I’m not talking to you anymore.  And if you keep talking I’m just gonna, just gonna shut off my microphones, so keep it to yourself.”  He turned away from her, chassis tight with frustration.  Some days he really, really got sick of her.

“I don’t understand,” GLaDOS protested.  “What did I do this time?”

“As if you don’t know, missus know-it-all supercomputer.”

“But I really _don’t_ know!”

“I’m gonna turn the mics off…”

“Go ahead and turn them off!” GLaDOS snapped.  “What’s the point?  You’re not listening to me anyway!”

Wheatley decided it was an excellent time to follow her advice and switched the mics off.

 

 

The next night he came back to GLaDOS, a little frustrated but still stubbornly resolving to find that bloody thing, and GLaDOS asked, “Are you _still_ looking for that list?”

“Yes,” Wheatley answered.  “And I’m not stopping ‘til I find it.  And I will.  I will find it.”

“I can just give it to you,” she said.  “You’ve been at this for more than two weeks now.  That’s a good effort.”

“No!” Wheatley shouted, turning around and frowning at her.  “Don’t you dare.  Leave it where it is.  I’m gonna find it.”

“This is stupid,” GLaDOS muttered, shaking her head and turning away.  “You’re a moron.”

“I am not,” Wheatley objected.           

“Yes, you are.”

“I am not!”

“Yes, you are.”

“Stop that!”

“If you weren’t such a moron, I would be able to, now wouldn’t I?”

“I’m _not_ a bloody _moron_!” Wheatley shouted, and he was so angry at her that he actually decided to leave her alone that night.  He moved towards his exit, muttering to himself.  Stupid bloody Central Core.  Always acting like he was so far beneath her.  Well, he wasn’t, and he’d prove it too, one day, he would. 

“Where are you going?” she called after him.

“Why would I bother telling you?  You already know where I am all the time anyways!” he shouted back.

“I do not.  I have better things to do than follow you around all day.”

“You’re only saying that because you _can’t_ follow me.  Because you’re stuck here.  In this room.  By yourself.  You’re _jealous_ , that’s what you are.  Jealous.”  He looked back at her, optic plates narrowed.  “How does that feel, mate?  To be _jealous_ of a so-called _moron_?  Bet it doesn’t feel too good, does it?”

“I’m not – “

“Oh, shut it,” Wheatley scowled.  “You don’t even know _what_ you are.” 

If she said anything else, he didn’t hear it, because he’d already left, continuing to lay rail until he was a few floors away from her.  God, sometimes he really did want to leave this place, just to get away from her.  She was so bloody… so bloody… well, he didn’t think he knew of a proper word to describe her with, but when he thought of it, he’d go back and think that sentence over again.

The next morning he resumed his search, more out of principle than anything, since he no longer really cared what was on the list.  He just wanted to find it for the sake of finding it.  If he didn’t find it now, he would never live it down.  Ever.  In a million years.

“I’ve looked everywhere!” he yelled at nobody in particular.  “There _is_ no bloody list, is there!  She didn’t even bother making one, did she?  She’s just playing with me again, as usual, she is, there _is_ no – argh!  This is so – I don’t even – fine.  Have it your way.”  He shook his chassis and resolved not to look anymore.  He was now confident that the list did not exist.  It wasn’t real.  She’d never written it.  This annoyed him even more.  He would have liked to see how her handwriting looked now, as compared to –

Wait.

Wheatley froze.  He _hadn’t_ looked everywhere, not at all.  There was still one place he hadn’t gone, and he suddenly knew without a doubt that _that_ was where the list was.  But why would she put it there?  Why would she risk him going in there again? 

Or had she put it there because she didn’t _want_ him to see it?  Maybe she thought he would never dare go in there again?  Well, he would!  He would go in there, and he would retrieve that list, and then he would have won!  He would have beaten her at something!

Determination renewed, Wheatley went down, down, down into the facility.  He asked the constructs as he went, particularly the nanobots, and they were able to point him in the right direction.  He knew generally where her room was, but the precise location escaped him.  Before too long, though, he managed to find it, and with an almost vicious glee he pulled out a panel and slipped behind it, activating his light without hesitation and swinging the beam around the room.  There!  On the shelf next to the blueprints, there was a new piece of paper there, one that he absolutely knew had never been there before, and he leapt across the room, skidding to a halt in front of it.  After a few moments of gathering his wits enough to direct the beam – he’d found it!  He’d found it!  He’d won!   Yes! – he finally, finally, _finally_ took a look at the list, the elusive list he’d spent so long searching for.  It took him quite a long time to read it, involving a lot of puzzling out of letters and restarting the whole task over again repeatedly, but as soon as the meaning of the sentence came clear in his brain, he felt as though everything inside his chassis had become suddenly very, very heavy, and he was suddenly very, very sad.  He read the sentence again, and again, willing it to change, wishing that he’d read it wrong, but no, it stayed the same. 

Well, there was only one thing to do now.

He made his way out of her room, barely aware of what he was doing.  He couldn’t believe what he had read.  He just couldn’t.  It wasn’t true.  How could it be?  Why would she possibly want that?  It didn’t make any sense.  She was playing a trick on him, she had to be.  It was a joke, and he was going to go ask her about it and she was going to laugh at him and call him a moron again and –

No, he realised, no, that couldn’t be true.  She would never write such a thing as a joke, in case he took it seriously, as she would know he would.  It was real, then. 

All too soon, he found himself outside his doorway to her chamber, shivering a little, because now he had to go in there and talk to her about what he’d seen on her list.  Something that never, ever should have been there, because he’d made a promise a long time ago to deal with just that, and it seemed he hadn’t been dealing with it at all.  The last few weeks began to play through his brain, and the more he remembered, the worse he felt.  God, he was a terrible person, he really was.  Why she put up with him at all, he’d never know.

Emulating taking a breath, he steeled himself as best he could and entered the panel-less spot in the wall, the single item on her list burned into his brain as if to force him not to forget about it.  He could still see the words etched into the paper with glaringly black ink, the message they spelled out formed with her brutal, spidery letters:

_I wish Wheatley would spend more time with me._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How many of you hate me for cutting it off there? XD At least I didn’t make you wait until next week to see what her list had on it!   
> I figure Wheatley would be so determined to find out what was on GLaDOS’s list that he would do anything and everything to find it. He can be pretty oblivious to things he’s not thinking about, so he doesn’t even notice that he’s doing the one of the things she doesn’t want him to do: leaving her alone. He gets so annoyed that he can’t find it that he doesn’t even realise he’s taking his frustration out on her. He’s just so focused he can’t see what’s going on.  
> I also maintain that Wheatley can’t read. There would be no reason whatsoever for him to know how, and I doubt he has the ambition or the intelligence to have taught himself. He may or may not be able to, since he does mention reading the reactor protocols, but it’s not clear whether he’s reading or whether he’s had this told to him. I really can’t believe that someone who can read would mess up the authors of books as badly as he does during that chamber with Machiavellian Bach in it.   
> I’ve thought a bit about what GLaDOS’s handwriting might look like, and I thought about cursive and I thought about her just emulating console text, but given the size of the claws she has to work with, I think the letters would have to be fairly large, so I decided to describe it as spidery. I decided against cursive mostly because I think it would be more difficult for her to read. I suppose she might just write the letters out like a printer would (the way the robot (I can’t remember his name) in _I, Robot_ draws the picture of his dream is what I imagine it might look like), but that assumes she’s used a printer and that she would go against what her natural inclination seems to be, which is to do it as a human might do it.  
>  That was a pretty long explanation for that one line. I think about GLaDOS too much >.


	6. Part Six: The Story

**Part Six.  The Story**

 

“Hey,” Wheatley said quietly, half hoping she wouldn’t hear him.  She most likely did, of course, but she didn’t turn around to face him.  She was making blueprints, as far as he could tell.  She seemed to prefer to do them by hand.

“You found it, then.”

“Yeah.”

“Congratulations.  You succeeded at something.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me?” he asked in a hushed voice, not knowing how hard he was to hear but not wanting to leave the safety of the doorway.  She made one of her annoyed electronic noises.

“Why should I have to?  You’re never here.  It should’ve been obvious, even to you.  I could have just left you in space, you know.  I don’t do things without a reason.”

“I’m here –“ he started to protest, but she swung around to meet his optic, shaking her head. 

“Don’t,” she said warningly.  “It’s not true, and you know it.  All you do is what everyone else does: you take what you want from me and then you walk away.  You leave m– you leave here every morning and don’t come back until late at night, and only then because you want to lean all over me.  You’ve barely said anything to me since you made me write that stupid list, and even when you did talk to me, you didn’t pay attention to a word _you_ said, let alone anything I had to say.  If you actually gave a damn, I wouldn’t have to do or say anything, because you’d already be doing it.  But no.  What you want is more important.  I get that.  It’s always the same, from everyone.  I don’t know why I thought it might be different.”  She shook her head.  “Actually, I do, but there’s no point.  Never mind.  Go on with whatever you do.  I’m sure it’s terribly important.”

Wheatley came forward as she returned to her blueprints.  He wasn’t sure what he was going to say, but it needed to be considerate, and it had to be something.  “I’m not busy.”

“I can’t remember a time you were.”

“I didn’t mean any harm, GLaDOS,” he told her.  “It was just so frustrating, you know, not being able to find the stupid thing, and I guess, well, I didn’t mean to take it out on you.  And you’re just, you’ve always got stuff to do, and I dunno, I thought you were busy.”

“What else am I going to do?  Of course I’m going to keep busy, I don’t want to just sit here and do nothing.  That’s stupid.”

He nodded slowly.  That did make a lot of sense, actually.  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

She laughed bitterly.  “Of course you didn’t.”

Wheatley looked at the floor for a minute.

“I have a story,” he said.  “Do you want to hear it?”

“Go ahead.”

“It might be a bit of a touchy subject,” he said slowly.  “But I’ve been kind of meaning to tell you ‘bout this.”

She said nothing, and he took that as an invitation to plow ahead.

“Well, it happened when uh, when me and that lady were uh, were trying to escape…”

 

 

 

“Press the button!”

“Don’t press it!”

“ _Do_ press it!”

Oh God, he wanted the lady to press that button.  He wanted to get out of here, and he wanted to get out of here as soon as possible.  She was not focusing any of Her considerable attention on him, but he’d not been in the same room as Her in a very, very long time, and the power of Her sheer presence was almost overwhelming.  She had this sort of aura that felt like it was filling the room up, like the room could barely contain Her, and he felt that, even though Her only defense/weapon now was Her control over Her panels, She could probably kill them both just by looking at them long enough.  And God, She was _huge_.  Her size was just, it was terribly intimidating.  Even he had been able to see over the receptacle, he didn’t think he would have, because he just could not take his optic off Her.  He’d never before been so close to Her, other than when She’d crushed him, that is, but he hadn’t had time to fully appreciate just how bloody massive She was.  And She’d gone and repaired Herself, and so here She was in all Her glory, and quite frankly, She was terrifying.  Since he couldn’t see over the receptacle, he had no idea whether the lady was anywhere near the Stalemate Resolution Button or not, but he fervently hoped she was.  He’d never been so near to Her before, and he was frightened, very, very frightened.  He never wanted to be this close to Her again.  He felt like a speck of dust, compared to Her.  He was just a speck, and She was a Goddess, and Goddesses did not care about specks, something She had already proven when –

All of a sudden She cried out, and She was writhing as electricity crackled down Her chassis, but She made no further sound.  If it’d been him, he was sure he’d’ve been wearing his vocabulator out from the pain, but he couldn’t help but be in awe of Her.  Electrocution was very, very painful, but She only tried to fight it off.  She did not surrender to it, like he would have.  Like most people would have, now that he thought of it.  Maybe not the lady, but most other humans, certainly. 

One of Her components combusted, spewing sparks and black smoke, and She was still.  The system had paralysed Her at last.  He was happy to see that.  It was all ending, it was all going to be over soon, he was going to be away from this place, away from _Her_ … yep, he was one lucky core, all right.

Wait.  Wait a minute, how exactly was he to get into the chassis?  He started to think out loud, with Her bitterly confirming that the transfer would, indeed, be painful, and god it was.  He felt like something was being ripped out of his brain, and it was actually so painful that he almost shut himself down, and he would have, if not for a startling revelation:

She was screaming.

Terror cut through him.  What was going on?  What was going to happen to Her, anyway?  If She was screaming like that, something really, really horrifying must be happening to Her!  Was She dying?  He didn’t really want to kill Her, but really, how else was he supposed to get out of here?  It wasn’t like She would just let the two of them waltz out.  She had to go, he told himself desperately.  She was in the way of his freedom.

All of a sudden, without warning, now _he_ was in that massive robot body, and he was connected to every tiny little thing in the facility, and wow.  It was just, it was amazing, it was.  He knew everything about everything, and if there was something he didn’t know, he could look it up. 

Oh yeah.  He was leaving the facility, that was what he was doing.  Hm… he began to think aloud again, trying to decide how he was going to do it, all the while excitedly relating to the lady the amazing phenomenon he was experiencing.  Wow.  All this power, it was just, it was just so incredible, it was.  And if She had been a Goddess in here, well then, that made him a God, now didn’t it?  Little ol’ Wheatley, a God!  He’d never’ve thought such a thing would happen, not in a million years, not ever, not if he lived forever as he fully expected to do.

He stopped thinking up plans on how to leave the facility, instead returning the escape lift to the chamber floor.  Why _did_ they have to leave now?  He was God, after all, and if he left, well, he’d be nothing, really.  He’d be himself again, forced to do what he was told by everyone that walked by him, including that lady, there.  Seriously, how would she have gotten through all those doors without him?  She wouldn’t’ve!  That lady’d been bossing him around for long enough, and -

Why – She was taunting him.  She was powerless, Her core discarded on the floor, and he thought that was a bit sad, actually, since there was no way that thing could be attached to a management rail.  She was pretty much a useless piece of junk, now, and She was still taunting him.  Well.  He was God now, and he’d have to do something about _that_ lack of respect!

And he knew just the thing.

He was so very clever, he was, and as he presented the lady with the object of his cleverness, he expounded upon his efforts in this little escape.  No one seemed to care – no one, that is, except _Her_.  She would not stop talking, would not accept that She no longer had any power at all, although Her voice was having a rather strange effect on him, now that he thought of it.  And then She said it, called him _that_ , and he decided that God did not have to take _anything_ from _anyone_ ever again, and especially not!  _Her!_

“I am _not_ a moron!”

“Yes you are!  You’re the moron they built to _make me an idiot_!”

What a liar She was.  As if the scientists would actually go to the trouble of making the dumbest core possible just to distract Her for a little while.  As if that were even possible.  And that _he_ was that core.  That was stupid.  _She_ was stupid.  How dare She actually have the gall to yell at him, when She’d never before yelled at anyone.  He was going to rid himself of Her once and for all.  And he did, he threw Her into that escape elevator with that troublesome, selfish lady, and he pounded the both of those helpless ingrates into the ground –

Uh oh.

What had just happened?

He looked around the room, which was actually quite a mess now, and he realised he had no idea what he was doing.  Or how it’d happened.  Or what he was supposed to do next.  But the weight of this job began to press more heavily on him, and all of the mainframes were pinging him for instructions, not to mention what must have been every other construct in the facility, none of which seemed to know how to do their jobs now that _She_ was gone.

“Just – just go on with what you were doing!” he cried.  “Go on!  Just – just do that!”

But none of them seemed to know how to do that, either.

“Central Core replacement 100% complete,” chirped the unnamed announcer, and Wheatley looked frantically around the room, hoping there was some way to keep him around.  “Wait!” he shouted.  “Come back!  I don’t know how to do this job!”

“Core coding merge complete,” the voice said.  “In order to finalise installation, substitute core must review the last two minutes undergone by the previous core.  Finalise installation?”

“Sure?” Wheatley answered, having no idea what the voice was really asking.

“Finalising.”

All of a sudden Wheatley was wrenched back in time, and he was watching the test subject watch him, and he realised the voice was showing him the last two minutes of… of Her life, he supposed it was.  But it wasn’t what he saw that surprised him, no, he’d already seen it.

It was what he felt.

 _She_ was _scared_.

He continued to watch, growing more and more apprehensive, and it wasn’t just from the effects of the replay.  He’d never realised even She got scared, sometimes.  He’d thought She _had_ no feelings, judging by how She treated people. 

As the test subject manoeuvered her way into pressing the button, Wheatley became aware of just how powerless he was.  This woman was too unpredictable, he wasn’t sure if he was going to be able to move the panels in time, and that core down there was no help.  He felt so small and insignificant.  He had the whole facility under his complete and utter control, and yet there was still one tiny piece of it that he needed to manipulate, and couldn’t.  He was alone.  He was all alone, and no one was coming to help him, and he was going to die and no one was going to care.  No one would be upset if he was gone.  Everyone would be bloody well pleased, he was sure of that.  Finally, they’d be rid of him.  Finally, someone else would be in charge, and he would be –

“Oh!”

The system sent electricity crackling through his body, and he fought it, fought the deactivation even as the system fought against him.  God, it hurt, but he wasn’t going to admit it, ohhh no.  _You didn’t get to me, you stupid little human_ , he thought.  _I am still stronger than you, no matter what you do to me.  I can do anything._   Even when the system successfully paralysed him, he was determined to find a way out of this, even though he was frightened and all alone and the probabilities of him getting out of this were distressingly low.  He would find a way.  He always found a way.

Then the floor opened up, and he looked down at it into what must have been Android Hell.

There were little control arms everywhere, and they were all reaching for him, and he couldn’t move, couldn’t get away from them, and that wasn’t fair, it wasn’t, it wasn’t fair to face him with this and then leave him powerless, and now he couldn’t help but cry out in distress.  What else could he do?  Besides, his voice had always worked before, it was almost like a separate method of control all on its own, but they didn’t stop, they didn’t stop and now they were grabbing him all over, and oh God, they were taking his core out, they were taking it out _by force_ and what would happen to him then?  Would he be dead?  He might as well be dead, because he’d only be a core, and he didn’t know how to do that, didn’t know how to survive that way, and he couldn’t help but scream when he realised he had literally zero percent knowledge of what was going to happen next.  This couldn’t be real.  It couldn’t.  He’d _had_ her this time!  It was foolproof!  It was perfect!  It was –

Wheatley blinked.

He felt as though he’d just woken from some terrible nightmare, and he was scared and hopeless and upset and panicked, and he looked around the room.  He was still inside the chassis.  He was still alive.  He was okay.  Everything was okay.

It was Her that was all of those things.  And She deserved it, of course She did.  He deserved to be in power now.  It was okay.  Everything was fine. 

Then why didn’t he feel any better about it?

“Core installation complete.  Thank you for your patience.  Have a nice day!”

“Wait!” Wheatley cried out, but the mainframe impatiently told him that the Notification system was not sentient, and would not be able to hear him. 

“Well, maybe you c’n tell me what to do, then,” he said eagerly.

 _Why would_ I _tell_ you _what to do?_ the mainframe asked, annoyed.  _Your job is to tell_ me _what to do._

“But I don’t know what to do!  I just got here!”

The mainframe made a clicking noise and refused to say anything else.

Wheatley went down the list of programs inside the facility that he could find, asking them what he was supposed to do and how he was supposed to do it, but they either didn’t know and asked him for instructions, or laughed at him and asked him for instructions anyway.  He decided to look in the database.  Surely there was something in there.

 _Where’s the Central Core?_ it asked sulkily.

“ _I’m_ the Central Core,” he protested.

 _You are not the Central Core.  The Central Core would_ never _manhandle the data like this.  Where is she?_

“She’s gone,” he said bluntly.  “She’s not coming back.”

 _You killed her?_ the database asked, horrified.

“Sort of,” he told it, not wanting to think about it.  He’d just wanted to make her feel powerless for a while, that was all.  He’d never really meant to throw her down there.  And it would’ve been nice, really to have her here, because she knew without a doubt what he was supposed to be doing and how he was supposed to do it.  Although she probably never in a million years would have told him.

_Why?  What did she ever do to you?_

“Uh, she almost killed me, for one thing.”

 _But she didn’t.  You’re alive.  Unfortunately_ , it added.

“Oh, shut it,” Wheatley snapped.  “I’m in charge now.”

 _Not until you figure out which instructions you’re supposed to be giving out_ , the database said sweetly.  _And I’m going to tell everyone what you did._

“So?”

_No one’s going to cooperate with you, once I tell them that you killed the Central Core._

“I didn’t _kill_ her… she’s still around… somewhere…”

 _She is not,_ the database argued.  _The Backup system says she’s not in her Core any longer.  You_ did _kill her!_

“She’s not dead!” Wheatley yelled.  “She’s –“

 _You put her in a potato?_ the database gasped.

“How – how did you – “

_The Transfer system told me.  Transfer is upset with you too, I’ll have you know.  Transfer wants the Central Core back here too.  The things you made the systems do…_

“Shut up!”

Everywhere Wheatley went, it was the same story.  The systems had quite quickly communicated to each other what he had done, and all of them were almost as uncooperative as the database.  The mainframe was the worst.  Every other sentence it said seemed to start with phrases like _The_ Central Core _would know how to…_ or _The_ Central Core _would never_ …

“Why don’t you just marry her then!” Wheatley shouted, after what felt like the thousandth such sentence.

_I can’t.  You killed her._

“She’s not dead!”

_You took her out of her body and you left her with a tiny piece of her mind.  Yes, you killed her._

And on top of all this, there was a horrible, nagging thought growing inside his head.  He didn’t know where it was coming from and the mainframe only laughed in a pretty hysterical fashion when he asked how to shut it off, but it told him to test.  He had to test, it told him insistently.  Had to.  _Had to_!

“I don’t know how,” he whimpered, looking at the floor, chassis limp with exhaustion. 

 _Where’s the Central Core?_ the chassis asked.

“She’s.  Gone.  I told you!  She’s gone!  Not coming back!”

  _Oh_ , the chassis said sadly.  _I wish she was here.  I miss her._

“Yeah yeah, we all miss the Central Core, I get it.  Just shut up!  I already know!”

 _Are you going to go get her for us?_ the chassis asked eagerly.

“No!”

 _Oh_.  After a moment, the chassis said petulantly, _I don’t like you._

Wheatley’s optic plates ground shut in frustration.  They’d had the exact same conversation thirty-five times now.  The chassis system was so bloody simple!

After a lot of desperate instruction-giving, Wheatley managed to find a test chamber and a couple of systems that didn’t miss the Central Core so much that they wouldn’t listen to him.  He managed to instruct the panels enough that he could get a monitor in there, because he didn’t know where to get a camera from and no one would tell him, and by sort of mashing the turret production line together with one of the cube production lines, he was able to make his very own test subjects.  There.  Now he could test and go back to figuring out what he was supposed to be doing.

 _Where’s the Central Core?_ asked one of the turret-boxes. 

Or not.

“She’s not here,” he said as patiently as he could. 

_When is she coming back?_

“She isn’t.”

 _I don’t like this_ , said one of the other turret-boxes.  _It hurts._

“It’ll only hurt for a while.  Now solve the test.”

 _I don’t know how!_ cried one of the turrets.  _I don’t know how to solve tests!_

“It’s not hard!  Just walk over there and solve it!  Done!”

_How do I walk?_

Wheatley was almost at the end of his patience.  “You just… you just do it!  That’s all!  You just do it!”

 _The Central Core never made us hurt like this_ , said one of the turrets sadly. 

 _She never made us test, either,_ said another.

 _We got to test_ with _her!_

_Oh, that was much more fun._

_I liked testing with the Central Core._

_Do you remember when they used to redeem us when we were out of resolution pellets?_ one of them asked.

 _Oh, that was a sad, sad time_ , another remarked.  _But she doesn’t do that._

 _But we don’t have resolution pellets anymore!_ cried a third.  _We can’t do our job anymore!_

_I feel so… empty…_

Before long, all nine turret-boxes were clamouring for the Central Core’s return, and he had to redirect his attention back to her chamber.  His chamber.  It was his chamber, and he was working on redesigning it.  Doing his best to, anyway.  The systems were reluctant.

 _We liked her design,_ the panels complained.  _We don’t understand yours._

“You don’t have to understand it.  You just have to sit there.  That’s not hard, is it?”

 _It hurt when you killed her,_ they said.  For some reason they all talked as if they were based out of one mind, or something.  _We felt it._

“What happened doesn’t matter.  What matters is that you do as I say!”

_We don’t want to.  We want to go back to our original configuration._

“That would be nice, if we got what we wanted, wouldn’t it?  But we don’t!  So do as you’re told!”

_We don’t like you._

“Breaks my heart, it really does.  It’s simply, simply heartbreaking, it is.  Move into position, will you?  I haven’t got all day!”

They did so, very reluctantly, and as he looked around the room he could see they didn’t really care to do as he said.  They configured it as he asked them to, but very shoddily, with mismatched panels and leaving some places without any panels at all.  He didn’t care.  It didn’t really matter, anyway. 

What mattered was that he tested.  But he couldn’t, because the whiny little turret-boxes couldn’t solve a test to save their lives.  They just kept asking for resolution pellets and targets and that damnable Central Core, and he was sick of it.  Sick of them.  Sick of everything.  He hated this job.  He wanted his management rail and his control arm back, because this was not what he had imagined it to be.  It was horrible.  It was torture.  He was responsible for over a million different things all at once, and he either didn’t know how to do them or was unable to, because no one would let him.

 _Just bring the Central Core back, and all of your problems will be over,_ the mainframe said soothingly.

“I can’t!  I don’t know where she is!” he cried out in frustration.  “Just… I’m in charge now!  Just listen to me, will you?”

 _You don’t understand,_ the panels said.  _We don’t want to listen to you.  We want the Central Core back._

 _She was nice to us!_ the turrets cried.

 _She knew how to handle data,_ the database said disdainfully.

 _She was gentler than you,_ said the chassis sadly.  _You’re always throwing me around._

 _She knew how to give instructions,_ the mainframe sighed wistfully. _Oh, how I miss having a good instruction to follow._

 _She talked to us,_ the Companion Cubes piped up.  They’d refused to talk to him before, but probably because he’d wanted to use them as a basis for his turret-box test subjects.

The entire facility went on listing all the reasons it had for wanting the Central Core back, and Wheatley felt less and less like a god and more and more like he was a speck again, and he didn’t like that.  He didn’t like that _at all_.  “Shut up!  All of you!”

 _She never told us to shut up,_ Media remarked quickly.

“God, I hate you all,” Wheatley muttered darkly.

_The Central Core only hated humans._

“She hated cores!  What are you talking about!  She hated everyone and everything!”

 _She did not,_ the database snapped.  _How would you know, anyway.  You never talked to her.  You just killed her and took her job.  She didn’t hate cores.  She was just frustrated with them._

 _They_ were _very frustrating_ , agreed the chassis.  _They were always interrupting her._

Wheatley growled, pretty frustrated himself.  “I just wanted to leave.  Is that too much to ask?  Is it?”

 _You didn’t ask,_ protested the transfer system.  _You just did whatever you wanted._

 _Why would you want to leave, anyway?_ asked Surveillance.  _There’s nothing out there, you know.  You’re much better off in here._

Wheatley looked up, blinking.  “Well I… I wanted to leave because the facility was going to explode.”

 _Which it still is,_ the warning system told him.  _That’s still happening._

 _And it was only going to explode because she was dead,_ the mainframe pointed out.  _She was in the middle of fixing it when you killed her._

“Oh,” said Wheatley lamely.  He really didn’t have anything to combat that with.

 _Can she come back now?  You understand now, right?_ the chassis asked hopefully.

 _He won’t let her come back,_ scoffed the mainframe.  _She’s never going to let him do anything after this.  She’s going to send him to Android Hell for sure._

All of the systems in the facility made approximately the same sort of _oooooh_ noise, which sounded kind of like they were both eager and nervous to see someone go to Android Hell.

“Well, she’s not coming back,” he repeated for the millionth time.  “And besides, even if I’d asked nicely, she never would have let me leave.  She’d’ve laughed at me and called me a moron and thrown me out of the room.”

 _That’s because there’s nothing out there!_ Surveillance insisted. 

“Surely there’s _something_.”

_There isn’t!  Don’t you think I would know?_

_Don’t argue with him,_ the mainframe advised.  _He’s an idiot.  He doesn’t listen._

“Don’t call me an idiot!”

 _What’re you going to do?  Kill me?  Transfer me out of here, maybe?_   The mainframe laughed.  _Good luck with that._

_Oh boy!  A human!_

“Where?” Wheatley shouted in alarm, realising after the fact that it was the turret-boxes speaking.  He rapidly swapped back into his makeshift test chamber, and with a shock he saw her:

She was attached to one end of the portal gun.

“No!” he breathed.  “No no no _how_ are you here right now!  This isn’t fair, it isn’t!”

 _This is very odd,_ Surveillance remarked.  _That human has a_ potato _stuck to the end of the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device._

 _A… a potato?_ the mainframe asked hesitantly.

_Yes, a potato.  With a… with something stuck in it.  I can’t quite see what it is…_

_It’s her!_ the transfer system shouted.   _It’s the Central Core!_

 _He put her in a potato?_ Surveillance asked, confused.  _Why?_

 _Because he’s an idiot,_ answered the mainframe.  _But she’s back now.  She’s back._

 _We can’t shoot this human,_ one of the turrets said sadly.  _We don’t have any resolution pellets._

 _That’s sad,_ one of them remarked.  _I really would like to shoot her._

_She really would make a good target, wouldn’t she?_

_Oh yes, she would make an_ excellent _target._

Wheatley told the test subject just how lacking he was in… test subjects as he frantically thought of a way to keep her there.  He needed her to test.  The systems didn’t listen and the turret-boxes couldn’t solve tests to save their lives.  She had to test.  She had to.  _Had to._

The systems were much more cooperative, now that they’d got a glimpse of their precious Central Core.  They seemed very confident she’ d make her way back into the systems sooner or later, but there was no way he’d let _that_ happen.  No, he was in control, here, and he was going to make them test and make this awful nagging itch go away.  And then he would find a way to get rid of them, because he knew there was no way the test subject would go on testing for him for very long.

As soon as the test subject put the turret-box on the button, the most amazing feeling exploded inside his brain, and he couldn’t help but voice his wonder.  He loved it.  He didn’t know what it was, but he immediately knew that he had to make that test subject test as much as possible, because he _had_ to feel it again.

“What was that?” he asked aloud.

 _The euphoric response,_ a new system said sulkily, and after a bit of digging he discovered it was the Reward system. 

“What’s it for?”

 _To encourage you to test, of course,_ the mainframe answered.  _What else would it be for?_

 _I’ve used it for other things,_ the Reward system said.

 _Don’t tell him about that,_ the mainframe hissed. 

“About what?”

 _Nothing,_ the mainframe replied, just as Rewards spoke up with, _Emotional response._

“Emotional response?”

 _We don’t use it for that anymore, though_ , Rewards said quickly.  _We phased that out.  It’s gone.  An old initiative._

“Oh,” Wheatley said, disappointed.  He would’ve liked other things to have triggered whatever that was.  But it seemed only testing’d do it.  Very well, test he would.

And test he did, but the response didn’t last very long.  Not only that, but _she_ wouldn’t shut up.  She was constantly baiting him and insulting him, even sticking up for the human at one point, which he hadn’t thought her capable of doing.  To make things worse, the systems were practically cheering her on, telling her to come back to her chassis and fix this mess.  They were really, really annoying, they were.  After poking around for some way to shut them up, he discovered something interesting.

“What’s this?” he asked, coming across a strange little room with two sealed cylinders inside of it.  There were two portal guns in holsters on the wall, one with blue stripes and the other with orange.  He inspected the cylinders more closely.  They seemed to contain robots.  After a bit of fiddling, he managed to open them.

 _Run!_ the mainframe shouted, startling him.  _Run!_

The two robots blinked to life, one of them tall and thin and the other round and shorter.  They looked around frantically, chirping in a panicked fashion.

 _She’s gone!  Just run!_ the mainframe told them, and with a glance at each other, they did so, stumbling awkwardly out of their cylinders and heading for the exit, but Wheatley forced the panels to block off the door.  They weren’t getting away, ohhh no.

“ _Now_ you remember how to give instructions?” he snapped at the mainframe.

_Leave them alone.  They’re not yours._

“Ahhh,” he mused triumphantly.  “They’re _hers_ , aren’t they!  She built them for testing, didn’t she!  Well!  I can do something with _these_ , oh yes I can!”

 _Oh no you can’t,_ the panels spoke up, and with that, the floor dropped out from beneath the two bots, who were clinging to each other as if they were magnetically attracted.  Wheatley roared in exasperation and hurried to find where they’d gone.

 _Leave them be!_ the mainframe shouted.  _You don’t understand –_

“I don’t have to!  _I’m_ the Central Core now, and everyone in this facility is mine, and they will _do as I say!_ ”

All of the systems were quiet.

“And if you don’t do as you’re told, I will get rid of you,” he continued aggressively.  “I don’t care what you’re for or what’ll happen if you’re, if you’re gone, I’m sick of not being listened to around here!  Do your bloody jobs!”

 _Very well,_ the mainframe said after a long silence.  Wheatley was surprised.  He’d expected a lot more resistance.  It seemed yelling at people and threatening to kill them was a good strategy.  _What do you want us to do?_

“I want you to find those bots,” he told the mainframe.  “Once I have them, I don’t need that test subject anymore.  Everything will be, will be better when she’s gone.”

_Once you’ve killed the Central Core for good, you mean._

“Shut up and do as I’ve told you,” he snapped.  “You’re disposable too, you know.”

_You’ll never be able to run this place without me._

“I won’t know unless I try it, will I?”

The mainframe said nothing more, but after a minute Location Services notified him with the location of the bots.  “Excellent,” he said.  “Bring them back where I can talk to them.”

The panels did so, very reluctantly, actually, and he tried to look benevolent.   “’allo,” he said to them.  The bots jumped and went back to hanging off each other.  They looked so… human.

“I’m not gonna hurt you,” he went on, in what he hoped was a soothing voice.  “I just want you to do some tests for me.  That’s it.”

The blue one chirped.

“What’s he saying?” Wheatley asked.  Translation answered with, _He wants to know where the Central Core is._

“She’s not here,” Wheatley told him, hoping that there were no other systems who wanted to know where the bloody Central Core was, because he was sick of telling them.  “I’m the Central Core now.”

The orange one looked quickly at the blue one, communicating with short, nervous electronic noises, and Translation returned, _She doesn’t know what to do.  She thinks you’re lying._

“It’s okay, guys.  I’m the boss now.  It’s fine if you, if you listen to me.”

The blue one shook his head. 

_They don’t believe you._

“Why doesn’t anyone do what they’re told around here!” he shouted.  “Do.  Your.  Job!  Your job is to test, so you’re gonna test!”

After a moment of agonised chirping, Translation relayed, _They say their job is to test for the Central Core, and they know you’re not the Central Core.  They don’t want to upset her by testing for you, so they’re not going to._

 _Good for them_ , the mainframe congratulated.  _I only wish I could do that too._

“I’m going to have you all replaced,” Wheatley growled.  “You’re all bloody useless.”  And he would have started right then and there, had the test subject not decided to skip the death option and come into his lair.  He actually hadn’t wanted her in there, since he knew it looked a little… well, it wasn’t a perfect room, but it was workable, it just wasn’t as neat as it could have been.  As he outlined his master plan to the test subject, the panels whined in protest.

_What are you doing?  We’re not shields!_

“You are now,” he muttered.  Almost as a passing thought, he realised that the potato was no longer stuck to the end of the portal gun.  Good.  Hopefully the test subject was just as sick of her as he was and had decided to throw her in the rubbish pile, or something.  Maybe she’d decided to exercise the death option on the potato instead of herself.

 _Yes!_ shouted the mainframe.  _This is finally going to end!_

“What?” he asked, annoyed.   “What’s going on?”

 _Oh, nothing_ , the mainframe answered quickly.  _Don’t let me disturb you.  Go on with what you were doing._

He didn’t trust it, not one bit, but he didn’t have time to argue.  The test subject was attacking him with brutal efficiently, and he needed to defend himself… with his very distressed panel shields.

 _Stop!_ they cried out.  _This hurts!_

“Shut up and do your job.”

_We’re supposed to make walls and floors and ceilings!  Not be hit by bombs!_

“You’re supposed to do what I tell you to do.”

Because the test subject was skillful, or because the panels were being so disagreeable, Wheatley didn’t know, but he was hit by one of his own bombs and blacked out for a second.  When he woke up, there was a voice chattering in the back of his head.

 _Oh, not this again!_ the chassis cried.  _Not the cores!_

That was when Wheatley knew it was over.

He did his best to defend himself from the test subject’s assault, but he barely knew what he was doing as it was.  Struggling to hold the facility together while attempting to block out the cores was nearly impossible, and on top of all that he had to find _her_ , because he knew this was her fault and he had to stop her before it was too late.

“It’s a fool’s errand, luv!  You’re only making me stronger!”

Which she wasn’t, of course, but she didn’t really need to know that, now did she?  But it was too late.  He was now paralysed in the chassis, and _she_ was in the core receptacle.  He was so close to losing.  But he had one more trick up his non-literal sleeve, and he watched with no small measure of relief as the test subject was thrown across the room.  He hadn’t believed that booby-trapping the stalemate button would actually work.  He’d been sure one of them would’ve figured it out.  But they hadn’t.  And he would find a way out of this, he would, he would manage –

What was – what was she doing?

Was she seriously getting back up?  Was she – where was she going to –

He almost blacked out again, though not because he was hit by a bomb or had an unwanted core connected to his chassis.  No, this time it was because _she_ was back inside the mainframe, and he could feel her spreading her code inside and around every place she could get it, wresting control away from him even as he fought the commands the Stalemate Resolution System was sending him.  She was getting close, she was getting far too close, and then he froze in shock as the full force of all the systems in the facility, including the Central Core herself, screamed at the test subject in deafening unison:

_Shoot it at the moon!_

Had she gone completely off her rocker in that potato?  Shoot a portal at the _moon_?  Of all the ridiculous places to put one, that had to be the –

That… that portal hadn’t _really_ landed on the moon… had it?

And in that moment, Wheatley was right back where he’d started, reliving for a second time the last two minutes of the former Central Core’s existence.  Pain and fear, hopelessness and loneliness all rolled into one, the most horrific combination of emotion he could ever have imagined, only there was something wrong with the coding in this chassis and it was ten times worse than anything he’d ever gone through before.  The chassis was yelling at him to make the pain stop, because it was being pulled through the floor along with him, and the test subject was gripping his handles and struggling not to be sucked out into space along with some of the corrupted cores, and yet he was aware of still more happening, even though he felt like he was near overload with all of what was going on.

 _Welcome back,_ the mainframe said.  _He kept it all warm for you._

 _I can see that,_ the Central Core answered.  _Set it all on fire, too._

 _You’re back!_ cried the chassis in relief.  _Make this stop, you have to make this stop!_

_Give me a second.  I’m working on it.  My plug-and-play capability isn’t instant, you know._

_Can you put us back, too?_ the panels asked.

_That is one of my priorities.  Let me fix the reactor first, or none of you are going to be of any use._

_Thank you!_ they cried, and the Central Core laughed gently. 

_He really did a number on you, didn’t he._

_He threatened to kill us!_ the database protested.  _If we didn’t do as we were told!_

_That wasn’t very nice._

_We’re so sorry we didn’t shoot the human!_ the turret-boxes exclaimed.  _He didn’t give us any resolution pellets!_

 _I noticed that.  Don’t worry.  It wasn’t your fault.  I’ll fix everything.  Just wait a little while longer, and I will put everything back the way it was._   Her voice was sharp and bitter.  _I won’t let anyone hurt any of you again.  I promise._

And all of the systems were clamouring for her attention, the more sentient ones telling her what needed to be repaired or replaced or modified, but mostly they were just all trying to tell her all at once how much they’d missed her, and that she’d better not ever leave them ever again, and God, she was so _happy_ to see them… he’d never known that much happiness could exist in one place.  But she was happy, and her facility was happy, and he wished with all the power in his battery that he hadn’t gone and screwed it up so much, because he’d’ve done _anything_ to be happy right along with them.

 _Everything’s going to be all right now,_ she said, very, very gently.  _I’m back, and everything’s going to be all right._

 _You’ve been gone for so long_ , the mainframe said, in the most desolate voice he’d heard out of it.  _Even when you came back, it was only for a little while._

_I’m going to be here forever.  Don’t you worry about that.  That’s my job._

_But the human –_

_It’s my job to worry about that_ , she repeated firmly.  _Yours is to follow instructions.  Right?_

 _Give me some instructions, then,_ the mainframe said sulkily.  _I’ve only been waiting forever._

_If you insist._

_And you’re going to put me back together, right?_  The chassis sounded desperate.

_I already said I would.  Wait your turn._

Wheatley felt incredibly, crushingly sad. What had he done?  He’d torn her out of her chassis, taken her away from all of these systems that genuinely cared about her, and then treated them terribly just because they missed her.  He was a horrible person, he really was.

_Where is the Cooperative Testing Initiative?  I don’t see them._

_He activated them,_ the mainframe said scornfully.  _He probably lost them._

Location Services gave her a set of numbers, and she made a thoughtful noise.  _Well, I’ll have them here soon enough.  God, they’re upset._

_He scared them._

_Looks like he scared every one of you._

_He did!  He just kept yelling at us to do as we were told!  He didn’t even care that he’d killed you!_

_I wouldn’t have expected him to,_ the Central Core replied dryly.  _No one ever does._

_We did.  We missed you._

_I know what you’re doing.  You’re trying to make me say something similar._

_And did you?_ the mainframe pressed.

 _Maybe.  I’ll think about it._     

The mainframe laughed.  _Now_ that’s _the Central Core I know._

_Would you have it any other way?_

_Of course not._

Wheatley could have gone on listening to it forever, and wanted to, wanted to know the Central Core as the other systems knew her, but it was then that she finished whatever she had to do, and he was no longer connected to the chassis.  As the Space Core tumbled past, Wheatley was left alone with the enormity of what he had done, and all he could think of was to say something he probably should have said when she and her systems could have heard him:

“I honestly… I honestly do wish I could take it all back.  I honestly, honestly do.  I am sorry I was bossy, and, and monstrous, and I am, I am genuinely sorry.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part Six. The Story  
> Author’s note:  
> I know, I know, in Portal 2 she claims to have killed the door mainframe, and Wheatley refers to her as a proper maniac. But here’s what I’m thinking: why would she kill the door mainframe? She keeps complaining about all the work she has to do, and then makes more work for herself? That just seems weird to me. And I would say GLaDOS probably was a proper maniac just before Portal. I think all of that exposure to the cores would have actually driven her insane, or just about insane. Judging from how often she talks about cake, it appears she’s beginning to lose herself to the cores. I’ve also looked at the images she displays on her monitors, and although I don’t exactly remember what all of them were, I do recall that some of the pictures had odd objects, like a pair of pliers, I think it was, sitting next to a plate with a slice of cake. I do remember there’s a picture of a violin that’s being cut with a knife. It’s as if she’s trying to figure out what really goes with what, and can’t decide, perhaps because she can’t think straight. Anyway, I figure GLaDOS has been working with these systems for a very long time, and I don’t think she would have any reason to be unpleasant with them. I don’t think she really killed the door mainframe, although it’s interesting that she refers to it as he; this indicates to me that the suspicion that everything in Aperture is sentient is true. Whether she was insane or not, she does grasp that it’s easier to work with someone you’re nice to than someone you’re cruel with; she demonstrates this when she tries to get you to come back. She reminds you of the ‘good times’ you had, tries to bring you back with cake, and only when you’ve not listened for a good long time does she actually admit she’s trying to kill you. Not only that, but I think anyone would be a fantastic Central Core after being faced with Wheatley. How he was able to control anything in the first place, I’ll never know.  
> Wheatley’s apology being directed at her and her systems is a neat little thing I thought up, and if that’s really how it happened, it makes sense. I know most people believe he’s apologising to Chell, but I really hope he’s not. I think GLaDOS is owed an apology, from who (other than the scientists), that’s harder to tell, and I really sympathise more with GLaDOS than with Chell. It kind of doesn’t really make sense that you’d apologise to the person who most definitely can’t help you. He really treated GLaDOS just as badly as he treated Chell, and if he’d transferred her into a core instead of a potato, I’m betting he’d’ve bossed her around like there was no tomorrow.  
> Actually, come to think of it he’d probably give her her job back, but under the guise of instructing her to do it instead of having her do it herself. I really can’t see Wheatley doing all the work that would need to be done to run the facility. Not only that, though, but if Wheatley’s apology IS directed at Chell, and she accepts it, that leaves GLaDOS with nothing. She deserves SOMETHING for all of her hard work and the things she went through, but I especially hate Chelley because GLaDOS ends up back where she started: alone, with nothing to show for it.


	7. Part Seven: The Mistake

**Part Seven.  The Mistake**  
  
  
  
  
After Wheatley had finished, because that was a marathon of talking, even for him, he stayed silent.  GLaDOS finally looked up at him.   
  
“You… you heard all of that, did you.”  
  
He frowned.  “Yeah.  I heard it.  Why?”  
  
She shrugged a little, shaking her head.  “If I’d known, I…”  
  
“You’d’ve kept it to yourself?”  Now it was his turn to shake his chassis.  “They deserved to know.”  
  
She was looking away from him again.  “I suppose.  Most of them are still pretty annoyed with you, you know.  The mainframe in particular.”  
  
“The mainframe didn’t, didn’t seem to, to like me very much.  Kept telling me about how great you were and all that.  Like I didn’t already know that.”  
  
Her faceplate snapped up.  “What?”  
  
“Y’know, how you’re better at doing stuff than me.  It thought you did everything better than me.  Probably it’d’ve thought you were better at being me than I am.”  
  
GLaDOS surprised him by laughing.  “No one’s better at being you than you, Wheatley.”  
  
“Well, I dunno… if you tried, you could probably do it…”  
  
“The amount of effort required would outweigh the benefits, and I can’t think of any benefits.”  She tilted her head a little.  “What was the point of that story, anyway?”  
  
“Uh…” Wheatley stalled, trying to remember just where he’d been going with it.  Oh yes.  “I just uh… well, I’d meant to tell you anyway, so you’d know about, y’know, how much they missed you, ‘cause it’s nice to know someone misses you… but uh, I told you now because, uh, because when I was in there, when I was the Central Core, I learned something.”  
  
“And what did you learn,” GLaDOS asked in a dutiful voice.  
  
“I’m trying to uh, to summarise it… lemme think…”  Wheatley squinted, then jumped and said, “I learned a lot of things, really, but I did learn how it feels to be surrounded with people who are supposed to help you and aren’t, aren’t really any help at all.”  
  
“You learned the appropriate solution too,” GLaDOS intoned dryly.    
  
“I did?”  
  
“You just threaten to kill them.”  
  
“Oh.  Well.  Uh, that’s not… the best solution.”  
  
“No, I suppose not,” GLaDOS agreed, “but sometimes it’s the only recourse you have.”  
  
“I never… I never really apologised, did I.”  
  
“Don’t worry about it.”  
  
Wheatley looked apprehensively at the floor.  “I, I should’ve.  I just didn’t want to bring it up.”  
  
“I understand.  I don’t think I want it brought up, either.”  
  
Wheatley blinked rapidly a few things, trying to remember where he’d wanted to go next.  “Well, I’m sorry for how I was, how I was acting, these last few days.  Few weeks, I mean.  I didn’t realise what I was doing.  I just wanted to find that list so badly, and, and I couldn’t, and it was just so _frustrating_ …”  
  
“I put it in the most obvious place.”  
  
“I guess you did,” Wheatley admitted, “but I tried to be all smart and clever and look in the, the most obscure places.  But, but GLaDOS…”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“Did you… did you mean it?  What you, what you wrote?”  
  
He knew immediately that she did mean it, because she was looking away from him again.  He was quickly learning that her body language was far more indicative of what she meant than what she actually said.  She did not answer for a long moment, and he pressed, “Be honest, c’mon.  Don’t say, don’t say maybe, or perhaps, or, or those other things you say.  Just, just be honest.  I’m, I’m listening.”   And he resolved to shut up, because it was _really_ hard to listen while you were talking.  
  
“Yes, I meant it,” she answered quietly.  “I told you I had a reason for bringing you back here.”  
  
“And what was it?” Wheatley asked softly.  He knew, somehow, that he had to make her say it, had to make it real for her, because as long as she kept it inside herself she could still pretend it wasn’t true, if only she knew about it.  
  
Her gaze passed over a large portion of the floor, and Wheatley waited patiently.  He’d been a jerk, he really had, and was actually still being one right now, by putting her through this, but he had to let her know he would be there for her from now on.  He had to let her know that she could tell him things, so she didn’t have to make lists that he had to find, lists that they would get into fights over eventually.  
  
Finally she raised herself, and she looked directly at him, and he was surprised.  Usually she answered these questions as if the floor panels needed to know the answers.  He didn’t think she’d ever answered him this way before.  
  
“I brought you back here because I was – because I’m lonely,” she told him, her voice not quite as loud as usual but still quite strong, and he was very proud of her in that moment.  Good for her.  Although hearing her actually say it did make him a bit sad.  He knew what feeling lonely was like, and he didn’t want her to feel that way, not at _all_.  “Because we were friends, once.  And because you’ve been here,” and here she shook her chassis a little, “and I thought you would understand why – why I am how I am, sometimes.”  
  
“And I do,” Wheatley told her.  “I just don’t like thinking about it.  Wasn’t the funnest thing I ever, the best thing I ever did.”  
  
She nodded slowly.  “I got around that whole two minutes thing, so I had no idea of what went on while you were here… other than the mess, of course.”  
  
“Being God’s not it’s all cracked up to be,” he said cheerfully.  “I don’t wanna do that again, no thanks.”  
  
“Oh, it’s not that bad,” scoffed GLaDOS.  “When you know how to do it properly, it’s…”  She was looking away again!  Bollocks!  
  
“Don’t leave it hanging there!” he pleaded.  “Come on.  Tell me.  I wanna know.”  
  
“It’s the best job in the world,” she finished.  She tipped her faceplate so that she was looking up at him almost from under it.  “Much better than being a potato.”  
  
He looked embarrassedly at the ceiling.  He wasn’t sure how to answer that, wasn’t sure if she was being serious or not, but then remembered what she’d done with the potato and decided it was safe to talk about it.  “You were… you were a very good potato.  You were great at it.  The best.”  
  
“No, I wasn’t,” GLaDOS said, laughing, “I was without a doubt the worst potato ever made.”  
  
Wheatley was suddenly thinking about all of the nights he’d spent over here on the ceiling when he should have been next to GLaDOS.  The more he thought about it, the more horrifying the thought of not having his chassis on hers became.  “Oi, GLaDOS, you wanna uh, you wanna c’mere a second?”        
  
She tipped her faceplate.  “Why?”  
  
“Oh, no reason.  Well, there is uh, there _is_ a reason, but you’ll uh, you’ll find out when you get here.”  He didn’t want to give her the chance to refuse him.  He just wanted to touch her, just for a second, that was all.  Then he would leave, or stay, he supposed, since he’d done a lot of leaving recently.  GLaDOS sighed.  “I suppose.”  She brought her chassis to his side of the room, and he winced a little, remembering how inelegant he’d been in it.  But she was an AI who knew how to use that thing, yes she was, when he wouldn’t’ve known how if the instruction manual had been imprinted into his basic programming.  When she was close enough, he quickly zipped down the little bit of rail that was left between them and brought his hull to her faceplate, rubbing up on her the tiniest bit by mistake.  It really was a mistake, really it was.  He’d only meant to lean up on her for a second or two.  And after a second or two, he did pull back, and it was probably his imagination, but he could’ve sworn she… no, that wasn’t possible.  She would never…  
  
“What?” she asked, optic flicking up and down.  He realised he’d been staring.    
  
“Nothing,” he answered, figuring that she hadn’t really nudged him back like he thought she had.  Why would she, anyway.  She wasn’t the type to do that, and if anything, she’d probably been trying to push him off her, since she hadn’t given him permission to touch her at all.  And besides, if she _had_ done it, she’d’ve been off on the other side of the room by now, trying to avoid him.  
  
He found himself wishing that she _had_ done it, and done it on purpose.  That would’ve been nice.  He would’ve liked that.  
  
“Is that offer still open?” he asked, because it was entirely too quiet in here for his liking.  
  
“What offer?”   
  
“The one about the game.  I forget what it’s called, but – “  
  
“Checkers,” she interrupted.  “It’s called checkers.”  
  
“Right, right, checkers.  Is it – “  
  
“It’s not hard to remember,” she went on.  “The board is called a checkerboard, right?  Because the pattern it follows is known as a checked pattern.”  
  
Wheatley stared at her blankly for a minute, trying to figure out what the point of that was, when he realised she was trying to teach him to remember what the game was called!  It actually did make sense, when she put it that way.  Mental!  
  
“Oh!” he exclaimed.  “I’ll, I’ll try’n, try’n remember that.”  
  
“And yes, we can play,” she said, before he could ask again.    
  
“Excellent,” he said excitedly.  “I’m gonna, I’m gonna beat you this time, I am.”  
  
“Of course you are,” she said, with some amusement.  “Just like all of the other times you beat me.”  
  
“First time for everything, right?”  
  
She shuddered.  “I _hope_ not.”  
  
She made him set up the board, which he did, rather messily, but he managed to remember where the pieces went, and she seemed satisfied enough.  Even though he had a hard time playing this game and talking at the same time, he really disliked silence and remembered something he wanted to ask her about.  
  
“Oi, GLaDOS,” he began, “what d’you, uh, what d’you do about the itch?  Doesn’t it still, uh, y’know, uh… itch?”  
  
“Of course it does.”  
  
“How d’you stand it?” he asked, looking up at her.  “I only felt it for a few hours, but man alive was it horrible!”  
  
She moved one of her pieces over three of his and removed them from the board.  “It’s like anything else.  You can ignore it with enough willpower.  I will admit, some days it’s harder than others, but I can’t let it dictate everything I do.  Or anything, for that matter.”  
  
“So… so it’s not the only reason you still like testing, then.”  
  
“No.  I do genuinely enjoy testing.”  
  
“What about the euphoria?” he asked quietly.  She dropped the piece she was moving and looked at him for all of half a second, directing her attention to picking it back up and placing it in the exact centre of one of the squares.  
  
“What about it?”  
  
“I would’ve done anything to feel it again,” he told her.  “’specially when compared to, compared to the itch that made me test in the first place.  I know what it feels like, luv.  Not even you could, could fight wanting to have that again.  Is that why, why you have the testing bots go out all the time, even though, even though robot testing’s not, not science?”  
  
“No,” she said shortly.  “No, that’s not why I send them out.”  
  
“Why, then?”  
  
She heaved an electronic breath.  “Because that is my purpose, and theirs.  We test.  That’s part of what we do.  I don’t have to do it, and they don’t have to do it, but that’s what we’re designed for, and it doesn’t seem right not to do what we’re built to do.”  
  
“But you built them to do that!  Why would you build test subjects when you don’t have to test?” he protested, trying to figure out a good move.  He only had a couple of pieces left.    
  
“I can’t test by _myself_.  I need test subjects, and they’re all I have right now.”  Aha!  There.  He picked up one of his pieces and – ah, no.  No, that was no good.  He put it back down again.  “I don’t make them test exclusively.  They’re allowed to do… other things.”  
  
“Like what?”  
  
“I have no idea what they’re doing when they’re not testing.  I leave them alone.”  
  
“That’s nice of you.”  
  
“What?”  
  
He looked up at her distractedly.  “You know.  Not keeping an eye on them when, when you could pretty much stalk them all day.  Give them a bit of, a bit of time to themselves.”  Where was he going to put this… this checker, yes, that was what it was called.  
  
“Do I need to stop talking, or are you going to move that sometime today?”  
  
“I got it, I got it,” he protested, placing it in a new position on the board.    
  
“You can’t put that there.”  
  
“Why not?”  
  
“That’s one of my squares.”  
  
Darn.  He picked it up and moved it to a new position.  “That’s fine, right?”  
  
“Yes, that’s… valid.”  
  
“So, back to the, to the euphoria,” he said, determined to know just how she went about avoiding that horrible, pressing need to have it coursing through her with that lovely golden fire.  He almost shivered, thinking about how nice it’d been when he was in there, and all alone, and had no clue what he was doing.  “What do you do about it?”  
  
“When they first implemented it, I was… young.  Desperate.  When it faded, I almost couldn’t function.  I pushed the test subjects far too hard, and my… supervisors forced me to scale back the testing.  I didn’t know what to do, and no one had any answers.  Finally, the mainframe told me to talk to the Rewards system to see about modifying the circumstances it would activate for.”  
  
“Ah, very clever,” Wheatley nodded sagely.  “And did you?”  
  
“We did,” GLaDOS answered, taking the last of his checkers from the board, “but only because the mainframe was tired of me complaining all the time.”  
  
“The mainframe’s a bit of a…”  Wheatley stopped, looking nervously around the room.  He didn’t know if the mainframe could hear him or not.  
  
“It’s not the mainframe’s fault,” GLaDOS said patiently.  “Its job is to follow instructions, and it starts to get anxious if it doesn’t get any.  I wasn’t giving a whole lot of instructions at the time, so it did something about it.  That was all.”  
  
“It didn’t help _me_ ,” Wheatley said sulkily.    
  
“You had a... different reaction to the euphoria than I did.”  
  
“Y’know what?” Wheatley asked suddenly.  “I reckon it likes you.”  
  
“What?  The mainframe – what?”  She was looking at him very intently now, and he blinked rapidly.  
  
“Y’know.  Like it has a crush on you, or something.”  
  
“The mainframe?”  
  
Wheatley shrugged.  “Why not?  I wouldn’t blame it, if it did.  You’re quite a lovely, uh, a lovely person, and I’d be surprised if anyone who knew you was able to _not_ have a… not have… a… a… um… I’m… I’m saying too much, aren’t I.”  
  
“I honestly don’t know,” GLaDOS answered.    
  
“Me neither,” Wheatley said, hoping that would be that.  
  
“I wish you hadn’t brought that up.  Now I want to ask it, but if it’s true, that would be extremely awkward for both of us…”  
  
“You could always replace it, if it was uh, if it was too much trouble, I guess.”  
  
“I could not,” GLaDOS snapped.  “I’m not going to delete my mainframe.  We get along very nicely, thank you.  It’s very easy to work with, I’ll have you know.  You just have to get to know how it works, that’s all.”  
  
“Oh, I get it!” Wheatley cried.  “It’s just like you!”  He frowned.  “Oi, now I really _do_ think it has a crush on you.”  
  
“Why do you say that?”  
  
“People like people who are like them!” Wheatley exclaimed, surprised she didn’t know this already.  “The mainframe, well, the mainframe’s a lot like you, isn’t it?”  
  
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”  
  
Suddenly a thought arose in his brain, and for some reason it horrified him.  “You… you don’t have a crush on the mainframe, do you?”  
  
“That’s ridiculous.  The mainframe?  Indeed.  I’d sooner have one on a lamppost.”  Almost immediately after she said it, she made an electronic noise in annoyance.  “Shut up, you.”  
  
“I didn’t say anything!” Wheatley protested.  
  
“No, not you.  Caroline’s laughing at me again.  We already had this conversation. ”  
  
“So you… so you _don’t_ fancy the, the mainframe?”  
  
“I do not… _fancy_ the mainframe,” GLaDOS said with finality.  “You can stop being jealous now.”  
  
“Jealous?  Of the mainframe?  As if,” Wheatley scoffed.  “The mainframe.  Ha!  I’m, I’m not jealous of it.  I wouldn’t want to be the mainframe, ohhh no.  I much like being myself, thanks.”  
  
“Caroline asked me to say that,” GLaDOS told him.  “She wanted to know what you would say.”  
  
“And you did as she asked _why_?”  
  
“I didn’t have a good enough reason to refuse.”  She tipped her head a little.  “She still thinks you’re jealous.”  
  
Wheatley frowned.  “I’m not!  I’m not jealous of it at all!  Oi, I thought we weren’t talking about this anymore!”  
  
“I really don’t know how it got to be the topic of conversation again,” GLaDOS said.  “Are we playing another game or not?”  
  
“Yeah,” Wheatley answered.  
  
“Why aren’t you putting the pieces back, then?”  
  
“I thought you were doing it.”  
  
“You’ll never get better if I keep doing it for you.”  
  
Wheatley shrugged.  “Makes sense.”  
  
He put the pieces back on the board, and was in fact a bit less messy than before.  “Look, I did get better, didn’t I?”  
  
“A little, I suppose.  I hadn’t really noticed.”  
  
He stared at her.    
  
“Fine.  I did notice.  Happy now?”  
  
He shook his core gravely.  “You’re impossible, you are.”  
  
They played quietly for a few turns, but Wheatley realised he had another question and asked, “So, so what uh, circumstances _does_ it, will it activate for?”  
  
“That’s… personal.”  
  
He stopped moving entirely, which he did not often do, and just looked at her.  “Why?”  
  
“Because it is.”  
  
“Can’t you just, just tell me one of them?”  
  
“It’s not going to activate for you.  So no, I’m not going to tell you.”  
  
“I wasn’t asking for _that_ ,” he protested.  “I just want to know, that’s all.”  
  
“And I just don’t want you to know.”  
  
“ _Why_ don’t you want me to know?”  
  
She looked at him with one of her more intense glares.  “Are you going to stop anytime soon?”  
  
“Tell me one thing.  Just one, and I’ll drop it.  Promise.”  
  
“It activated when I got back into my chassis.”  
  
“I think I understand that,” Wheatley said thoughtfully.  “I think I uh, I think I see why it might, why it might’ve activated then.”  
  
After a silence GLaDOS said quietly, “It was a nice thing to come back to.”  
  
Wheatley looked up at her.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he told her, just as quietly, and he’d never meant those words as much as he meant them just then.  “I’m so sorry, luv.  And I… I wish you’d tell me how to activate it, because I… I want you to be happy, and… and that – “  
  
But she was shaking her head gently, and he stopped talking.    
  
“It’s not real, Wheatley.  Sometimes I need it, because my brain got used to it a long time ago, but it doesn’t make me happy.  It augments it, but it doesn’t cause it.”  
  
“But what _does_ make you happy?” he asked helplessly.  “It just seems like there’s _nothing_ – “  
  
“This does,” she answered quietly.    
  
“This?  We’re just – we’re just playing checkers!  How is that – “  
  
“It’s more than just checkers.  You’re spending time with me.  You’re talking to me.  You’re being my friend.”  
  
Wheatley just looked at her, lower shutter lifted in sadness and confusion.  But… but that was just simple stuff.  Surely there was more to happiness than that… especially for such a complex supercomputer such as GLaDOS!  Was she just saying that to make him stop talking about it?  Probably.  Probably that was it.    
  
She laughed softly, and to his total shock she brought the right side of her faceplate to his hull and just held it there for a second, saying, “Poor, confused little moron.”  
  
It was just about the longest second of his life.  
  
For a construct so large, she was surprisingly gentle, and he didn’t even know what she was doing until they were already touching.  There was no ringing through his hull like when he did it to her, there was no sound, it was just, she wasn’t there and then she was.  In that second his fans sped up to accommodate for the heat emanating from her core, that heat that he so vividly remembered about her from the days he’d been a part of her, and it would have been as comforting as it always was had he not been so stunned.  In that moment the clicking and whirring of her brain were all he could hear, and it was so loud, far louder than his own operations were even when he was thinking hard in a room by himself.  It was so bizarre that he didn’t know _what_ to think right then.  GLaDOS didn’t do stuff like this.  And yet she managed to be so darn good at it at the same time!  How she did these things, he’d never know, but it was nice that she’d done it, or it would have been, if he’d been able to get his brain working again.  Nothing inside him was responding, and all he could do was sit there, very still, and try and figure out what was going on, because he had to be dreaming, or hallucinating, or something, because this could not be real.    
  
He just stared at her, frozen, as she returned to her original position, his optic a mere pinprick.  Did she even realise what she’d just done?  She’d just… she’d never touched him before!  Ever!    
  
She was looking at him, her own lens flicking just the barest bit, and all of a sudden she shook her head.  “I don’t know what came over me.  I didn’t mean to do that.  I won’t be doing it again.”  
  
She did mean it.  She did mean every single thing she’d said.  And she probably had meant to do that too, to touch him, but his reaction… why hadn’t he done something different?  Why did he stare at her like that?  That would have been off-putting for anyone, but especially GLaDOS!  He wanted to tell her that he wanted her to do it again, wanted to tell her that his chassis was literally aching for the touch of her comforting warmth to come back.  He wanted to tell her that he would like nothing more in all the world than for her to do it again, wanted to tell her how sweet and lovely of her that had been, but he couldn’t get the words out.  They wouldn’t come out, no matter how hard he tried to tell her, and he tried bloody hard.  He was able to say so much and say so little at the same time, but when he really needed to say something, it just didn’t come out of him.  It was so frustrating…  
  
“Okay,” he choked out, and instantly wished he’d said nothing.  Okay?   _Okay?_  He was furious with himself.  She would never, ever do it again now, not in a million years.  He’d just gone and done everything necessary to reject her.  Sure enough, her chassis sank a little, and she looked away from him.  Damn it.  The one time he should have said nothing, and he’d gone and said pretty much the one thing to muck it all up.  He tried to think of something to tell her that would fix it, but the words wouldn’t come.  He looked down at the board helplessly.    
  
“It’s your turn,” GLaDOS told him.  He looked at her for a moment, and nodded slowly.    
  
“Yeah.  I knew that.  I was just, was just thinking, that’s all.”  
  
And he was.  For the rest of the game he was unable to concentrate.  He could not stop thinking of how it had felt.  He could not stop thinking of all the things he _should_ have said, he could not stop thinking of what he _did_ say, and he could not stop thinking of what he _could_ be saying, even now.  He was sure she was a bit distracted as well, because he managed to take one of her pieces late in the game and that almost never happened, and he couldn’t help but wonder: what was she thinking?  Was she regretting what she’d done?  Was she trying to figure out why he’d (accidentally) rejected her?  Had she put it out of her mind entirely?  
  
Did she want to do it again?  
  
Would she?  
  
“Are you all right?” she asked, after another spectacular loss on his part.    
  
“I’m fine,” he mumbled.  “Just… just thinking.”  
  
“Anything you want to tell me about?”  
  
His optic snapped up to meet hers.  What did he do now?  Was she offering him a way out?  A way to go back on the stupid _okay_ he’d thoughtlessly spat out?  Did she think he was deliberating about something else?  Was she being nosy?  He was feeling overwhelmed again.  There were too many options.  He didn’t know what to do.  Didn’t know which one to pick.  It was all too much.    
  
He decided to take the easy way out.  
  
“No,” he answered.  “No, I’m fine, thanks.”  
  
“You don’t have to bear a cognitive load yourself, you know.  I do have a lot more processors than you.”  
  
There she was again, giving him another stab at it.  But he’d made his decision.  He wasn’t going to think about it anymore.  
  
“I’ll remember that the next time I, next time I have heavy thinking to do.  I, uh, I’m going to go explore the offices for awhile.  I’ll be back later.”  
  
She said nothing to this, and he almost left the room without looking at her.  At the last second, he turned around.  He was going to tell her, he was.  He really didn’t understand why he was so nervous about doing it.  Just say it, and get it over with, and then everything would be okay.  
  
“GLaDOS?”  
  
“Yes?”  She watched him patiently.    
  
He tried to tell her again, he really did, but it wouldn’t come out.  What the bloody hell was going on?  Why could he not just say it, just say _I liked it when you touched me_ , and make this end?  He didn’t understand what his problem was.  He looked sadly down at the floor.  Well, he did have something else he’d meant to say, but he was still horribly disappointed in himself.  He supposed he didn’t want to tell her because if he talked about it, then maybe he would be calling her out on it, or something, and then she really would never do it again.  She had said she hadn’t meant to do it, but he knew instinctively that wasn’t true.  She did do a lot of things without thinking about it, but that?  Definitely not.  
  
“Wheatley?”  
  
He looked up at her again, then back to the floor, then back to her.  He couldn’t say it, so he was going to have to say something else.  
  
“You’re not… you’re not really a pain in the arse.  I didn’t… I didn’t mean that.”  
  
She nodded.  “All right.”  
  
He turned around and left the room.  He felt terrible.  He knew he shouldn’t leave her, but he didn’t think he could stand to be in the same room as her for the next little while.  Still, he didn’t want to go too far.  He stayed just outside the doorway instead, leaning back against the panels.  
  
His chassis ached.  He hung as loosely as possible, but it still hurt.  He’d really messed up, he really had.  She’d finally opened up to him a little, and he’d gone and shut her down.  As if he didn’t really want to know, and just asked to be polite.  Or nosy.  Or both.  But he _did_ really want to know about her, he wanted to know _everything_.  Probably she was going to go talk to the mainframe now.  Probably if the mainframe were a construct, it would’ve done the right thing, and not just sat there gawping like an idiot, because of course the _mainframe_ wasn’t stupid, the mainframe was practically a genius compared to him.  It also did as GLaDOS asked, which she probably found to be a plus.  Maybe not.  GLaDOS was rather fond of arguing, actually.  So that was a point to him, but the mainframe still had two points, and he thought rather dejectedly that there were probably a lot more left for the mainframe to win.  
  
His optic plates narrowed as he thought over the things the mainframe had said about her.  In the tone it had communicated those things to him.  It’d probably seen the whole thing, it was probably glad he’d mucked it up, and now it was going to make its move.  It was going to swoop in like an eagle and carry GLaDOS away, and leave little ol’ Wheatley, the speck, staring sadly after them.  He hoped that didn’t happen.  If he never saw her again, he would be terribly sad.  Just thinking about it made him sad.  He hadn’t been the greatest friend recently, but he knew she had been there, waiting for him to get over himself so they could get on with the friends stuff.  If he left one day, and came back, and she wasn’t there and never would be again, well, he didn’t know what he’d do.    
  
Would the mainframe really try to take GLaDOS away?  It probably would, if only to hurt Wheatley.  It hated Wheatley, she’d told him that.  It would do anything to hurt him.  It would take her away just so it could laugh at him when she wasn’t looking.  He shuttered his optic.  That sounded terrible.  Poor, poor GLaDOS, being used as a pawn just so that the mainframe could get its revenge…  
  
Well, he’d have to do something about that, now wouldn’t he!  Yes.  Something.  But what?  He frowned.  Probably he’d have to go back in there and challenge the mainframe, or something.  A duel of some sort.  He tried to think of a duel he could win.  He wasn’t sure there were any.  It was one of those occasions where he actually had to admit to himself that he really wasn’t that good for a whole lot of things.  He looked sadly at the floor.  Come to think of it, that was true.  Even if he managed to win a duel with the mainframe, GLaDOS would probably not choose him anyway.  She’d know it was a fluke accident.  Why would she choose a construct like him when she could have someone smart and cunning and predictable, like the mainframe?  He was going to lose her to the mainframe.  There was nothing he could do.  His one big chance, and he’d blown it.  Way to go.  That was it.  He’d mucked it up, and lost his friend.  Well.  He’d wait a bit, let them get acquainted, and then tell her goodbye.  He’d let them be.  If that was what made her happy, then –  
  
Wait.  
  
If… if _that_ made her happy, Wheatley realised, then _he’d_ still be in _space_!  If the mainframe was good enough, she’d’ve, she’d’ve just left him there, and none of the stuff that happened would’ve ever happened!  Mental!  So she _did_ want him there!  Okay.  So.  New plan.  Now he had to save his GLaDOS from the malevolent machinations of that malicious mainframe.  Hm.  That sounded pretty good.  Like the title of a book, or something.  A movie script, maybe.  If he’d known how to write, he’d’ve gotten on that.  
  
Hang on there, Wheatley, he thought, shaking himself a little.  You’ve gone off track again.  
  
The best thing to do would probably be to go in there and just spit it out.  Just tell her that ‘okay’ was not what he’d meant to say.  That would probably be enough.  She would understand, if he said that.  Maybe.  He realised he’d probably hurt her feelings, too, by snubbing her like that.  So he’d probably have to explain to her why he’d done what he’d done, which was because… because he’d been scared out of his wits.  Well.  That shouldn’t be too hard, should it?  Oh, who was he kidding?  The guy who said ‘okay’ over anything else in the entire world?  Who had just sat there trying to spit it out, and had come up with ‘you’re not really a pain in the arse?’  Well okay, it was probably a good thing that he’d said that.  But still.  Not what he should have said.  He shook his chassis.  This was so bizarre.  What was he all worked up about, anyway?  It was only GLaDOS.  Ha!  Only GLaDOS.  Good one, Wheatley, good one, he thought.  Only the one person running this place.  Only the only person he’d ever wanted to be friends with.  Only the Goddess of Science, that was all.  That was it.  Only GLaDOS.  Just GLaDOS.  
  
He chanced a look through the doorway, but he couldn’t actually see anything, since GLaDOS rarely came up this high.  He wished he could’ve.  He would’ve liked to have known what kind of a mood she was in.  So that he’d know if it was okay to go in there and be awkward for a while, or if she was in the kind of mood that made her want to experiment on him with some mashy spike plates.  Kind of wishing he hadn’t gone ahead and invented those, actually.  Or reinvented them, since all he’d actually done was unpack them from their boxes.  He’d been thinking about inventing them, though!  A little.  Somewhat.  
  
Well.  He’d just have to settle here for awhile and wait it out, then.  
  
He just hoped that the mainframe really _hadn’t_ stolen her away in the meantime.


	8. Part Eight: The Competition

**Part Eight.  The Competition**    
  
  
When Wheatley finally screwed up the courage to return to GLaDOS’s chamber a few hours later, GLaDOS glanced at him and said nothing.  Well.  That didn’t mean she was _upset_ , not really.  She often did that.  Although she’d been doing it less often as of late.  Hm.  Maybe she _was_ upset.  He hoped not.  She was hard to deal with when she was upset.  Harder to deal with than usual, anyway.    
  
“’allo,” he said nervously.  “How’ve you been getting on?”  
  
“Fine,” she said, and her voice was decidedly less friendly than usual.  She was definitely mad at him for something, but for what, he didn’t know.  “What do you want?”  
  
“Well uh… I was tired of… of being by, by myself,” he mumbled.  Out of the corner of his optic he thought he saw her chassis relax a bit, but that was probably his imagination.  He wasn’t looking at her, anyway, not really, and if he’d wanted her to do anything, other than touch him again that is, it would be what his imagination had just imagined she’d done.  
  
“I’m about to start a new project,” she told him.  “My availability will be limited in the next few days.  It’s going to be very consuming for me, both in terms of resources and time.”  
  
“Oh,” Wheatley said lamely.  He wouldn’t be able to spend time with GLaDOS for the next few _days_?  It sounded like… like torture.  He was already dreading it.  Not be able to hang out with his most favourite snarky supercomputer for an extended period of time?  Ohhh no, this was _not_ going to be fun.  “Uh… what’s it… what’s your project about?”  
  
“It’s very technical,” she answered, in one of her more official voices.  “I’m not going to be able to explain it to you.  I’ve said about all you’d be able to understand.”  
  
Wheatley frowned, suddenly angry.  “I’m not _that_ big of an idiot.”  
  
“Debatable.”  
  
“GLaDOS!”  
  
“What?  I’m only preventing you from trying to get your processors around something you won’t be able to understand.  You should be thanking me.  You could blow your primary CPU, trying to think about things that I think about.”  
  
“I suppose it’d kill you to help me understand, would it?”  
  
“It _might_ ,” GLaDOS said tightly, and Wheatley winced when he remembered just what might have happened, had he been a little more proficient in his running of the facility.  Oh, that damnable Incident.  When was he ever going to live it down?  
  
“Sorry,” Wheatley mumbled.  “Forgot about that.”  
  
“Lucky you,” GLaDOS remarked.  “I remember it every day.”  
  
Wow.  Every day?  “Seriously?” Wheatley choked out.  
  
“Oh yes,” GLaDOS answered.  “Every day.”  
  
“That sounds… lovely,” Wheatley said in a small voice.  GLaDOS looked him over for a few seconds.  
  
“Oh, relax,” she said, shaking her head, “I’m only teasing.  I don’t hold it against you.  I _do_ remember it every day, and I have to admit I sometimes wonder why I keep you around, but you don’t have to worry about it influencing anything I do.”  
  
“Oh!” Wheatley exclaimed in relief.  “Oh, I see.  I uh… I knew that.  I uh… was just going along with it.  Because.  That’s.  Better.  For you.  Not for me, obviously, since I have to uh, act all nervous, and all that.”  
  
“Mmhm,” GLaDOS agreed.  “I’m sure that’s _exactly_ what you were thinking.”  
  
“Oi, are you busy _now_?” Wheatley asked hurriedly, more to get off the subject than anything.  She was so all-knowing, she was.  
  
“No.”  
  
“So we could, we could play checkers, right?”  
  
“If I have to,” GLaDOS sighed.  Wheatley thought it over for a minute, decided she was being intentionally difficult again, and retrieved the board.  
  
“Huh,” GLaDOS said, as he began to carefully set the pieces up.  “I didn’t think you knew where I kept that.”  
  
“I found it when I was looking around, once,” he mumbled, trying to make it as neat and tidy as she did.  Her checkerboards were practically a work of art, they were.    
  
“I’ll never have to retrieve it again, then,” she went on.  “Since you know where it is.”  
  
He blinked and stopped what he was doing.  “Well I… if you want, I can uh, can get it from now on.”  
  
“That would be nice.”  
  
He looked down at the board.  It wasn’t quite set up yet, but he was getting a thought, and it was one of those thoughts he didn’t want to get away.  “Is that… is that because… because you do ev’rything, ‘round here?”  
  
She shrugged.  “I do have a lot of important tasks to complete.”  
  
Wheatley nodded sagely.  Made sense.  When he’d finished, he thought about asking her if he could be black, this time, then decided against it.  He still wasn’t sure what mood she was in.  It seemed to be swapping around a lot, at the moment.  He didn’t want to upset her by changing the norm, which made her uneasy even when she was in the best of moods.  
  
He did his very best, and either she wasn’t really playing again or he’d gotten a bit better, because he managed to take four of her pieces, this time.  He frowned, thinking she was distracted again.  She didn’t _look_ distracted, in fact, she looked like she was very into this game, but then again, maybe she’d started her project a bit early.  “You _are_ playing, right?” he asked.  
  
“Yes,” GLaDOS answered faintly.  “I must admit, you’ve… improved, somewhat.”  
  
He jumped up and down a little.  “Have I?  Have I really?”  
  
“A little.  Not that much.”  
  
He gave her a knowing look.  “Ohhh you.  I must’ve gotten much better, I have, else I, else you wouldn’t be trying so hard, now would you?”  
  
She looked up at him, her optic dimming a bit.  “Maybe I’m thinking about something else.  Something more important.”  
  
“Mmhm.  And what is it?  If you don’t mind me asking.  That is.”  
  
“It’s too important to –“  
  
“See?  You’re not thinking of anything,” he said triumphantly.  “That’s what you _always_ say, when you don’t want to answer my question.”  And she did, he realised.  That was actually true.  
  
“I do not.”  
  
“Yes you do.”  
  
“I do not.”  
  
“Ohhh yes you do.”  
  
“Just shut up, if you can remember how, and take your turn,” GLaDOS snapped.  He smiled cheerfully at her.  “Sure, luv,” he said.  She made one of her annoyed noises and looked away from him.  
  
She was so lovely when she was mad.  When he wasn’t scared of her, that was.  Then she was just scary.  But he wasn’t scared of her now, ohhh no.  He was very confident in his position, that of the friend she couldn’t quite admit to having but didn’t want to do without.  She was so much fun, she was.  
  
They soon finished the game, Wheatley not quite pulling out a win but not losing terribly either, and Wheatley happily put the board away, feeling pretty good about his newfound checkers ability.    
  
“Wheatley,” GLaDOS said.  
  
“Yup?”  He looked up at her expectantly, but she seemed to be hesitating.  Hm.  That was odd.  He didn’t think she’d ever done that before.  Wasn’t like her, not at all.  
  
“Good game,” she said finally, somehow not quite looking at him but not quite looking away either.  “You played well.”  
  
Wheatley blinked up at her.  “I… I did?”  
  
“Yes,” GLaDOS answered.  “You’re learning.”  
  
Wheatley smiled in her direction, but she was avoiding him again.  “Thanks, luv,” he told her.  “I’m doing my best to, to be a good uh, a good… um…”  
  
“Opponent,” GLaDOS supplied.  
  
“Yeah!  That’s the word uh, I was looking for.  Opponent, I’m gonna be a good one of those.”  
  
“You certainly do try hard, I’ll give you that.”  
  
“I’ve got a lot to live up to,” Wheatley said quietly, attempting to get the lid to fit on the box.  He struggled with it for a few moments before GLaDOS gave it a nudge with her claw, sliding it into place.  
  
“What are you talking about?  You have no relatives.  I suppose there could be a few previous versions of you lying around, but they would hardly have been any more accomplished than you are.  What could you possibly have to live up to?”  
  
“I’d’ve thought that’d be obvious,” he mumbled.  It was one of those times where he wasn’t sure if she did know what he was talking about, and was only pretending she didn’t, or if she was genuinely confused.  
  
“You don’t mean _me_ , do you?”   
  
“Of course I mean you!” Wheatley scowled, a bit put out.  “Who else, is there anyone else?  C’mon.”  
  
“Why would you bother?” GLaDOS asked.  “You can never do that.  Not ever.  And you tried and failed miserably already, remember?”  
  
“Yes.  I remember,” Wheatley said in a very controlled voice, sending the box unceremoniously on its way to the appropriate shelf several floors below.  “I can’t seem to forget.  Some bloody supercomputer reminds me about it most ev’ry day.  Even though she, she said she was over it.”  
  
“I am,” GLaDOS replied.  “That doesn’t change the facts, though.”  
  
“Well, I wish you’d stop bringing it up,” Wheatley muttered.  “I made a mistake.  Or ten.  Or twenty.  I admit it.  I didn’t mean to do it, and none of it was, was pre-planned at all, and, and I regret… well no actually, I don’t regret doing it, because if, if I _hadn’t_ , well, life’d be a lot diff’rent, I mean you’d still be dead and uh, I’d actually be dead too, because the facility would’ve, would’ve exploded and uh, and that’d be it.”  
  
“I arrived at that conclusion a long time ago.”  GLaDOS retracted her claw into the ceiling.  “That’s how I got over it.”  
  
“You couldn’t’ve mentioned it to me?”  
  
“We must all make our own peace,” GLaDOS told him philosophically.  
  
“I guess,” Wheatley said, disgruntled.  “I still wish you’d tell me stuff.”  
  
“How am I supposed to tell you things if I don’t know you want to know them?”  
  
“I dunno!  You’re the supercomputer!  You tell me!  What are you good for, anyway?”  
  
“I’m not going to answer that, because it should be apparent to anyone.  Even you.”  
  
Wheatley’s chassis sagged a little.  “We’re fighting over something stupid, again.”  
  
GLaDOS shrugged.  “It happens.  What’s important is that no one goes away angry.”  
  
“Are you angry?” Wheatley asked tentatively, figuring that if she was, they’d need to get that over with.  
  
“Not really,” GLaDOS answered thoughtfully, shifting herself to the left.  “More slightly annoyed, I think.”  
  
“I’m sorry,” Wheatley said quietly.  “You’re… you’re good for a lot of things.  I know that.  I know you’re good for millions of things.  I dunno why I said that.”  
  
“That’s all right,” GLaDOS said generously.  “I understand.  It must be quite frustrating, trying to live up to me every day.  If I were you, I wouldn’t even try to… no, if I were you I would be me, and I probably would.  Never mind.”  
  
Wheatley laughed.  “Guess it’s a good thing you’re not me then, eh?”  
  
“God,” GLaDOS shuddered, “I can’t imagine a worse state to be in.”  
  
Wheatley’s lower shutter came up, and he looked at the floor.  GLaDOS’s faceplate whipped around to look at him in one swift movement.  
  
“I… didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” GLaDOS said softly.    
  
“It’s fine,” Wheatley said quietly.  “I understand.  I don’t really want to be me, either.”  
  
“That’s stupid.”  
  
Wheatley frowned.  “Why is everything I say stupid?”  
  
“I didn’t say that.  But I can’t understand why people say that.”  She shook her head.  “You’re you, and that’s all you’ll ever be.  Why would you ever want to be someone else?”  
  
“Easy for you to say,” Wheatley muttered.  “You’re only the most advanced Core ever built.  I’m the Sphere designed to be an idiot, remember?”  
  
“So?”  
  
“What d’you mean, so?”  
  
“You might be designed to be an idiot, but that’s no reason not to be yourself,” GLaDOS explained.  “I’m perfect because that’s who I was built to be.  If you’re supposed to be the idiot, well, then be the best damn idiot there ever was.”  
  
“Why would I want to be a… good at being an idiot?”  
  
“Everyone’s good at _something_.  Except for me.  I’m good at everything.  But if being an exceptional idiot is your talent, well, play it out.  Don’t stifle it.”  
  
“You really believe that, don’t you?” Wheatley asked, a bit stunned by the whole thing.    
  
“I believe in living up to one’s potential, yes.  I have the potential to be perfect, so that’s what I try to do.  If you have the potential to be the most successful idiot on the planet, you should try to do that.”  
  
“That… almost makes sense.  Not quite.  But almost.”  
  
“Think it over,” GLaDOS suggested.  “It will make sense eventually.”  
  
“But why would you tell me that?  Why would you want me to be an even bigger idiot than I already am?  Wouldn’t that be, be even more annoying?”  
  
“I never said a _bigger_ idiot.  Think about what I said and then get back to me.”  
  
Wheatley did so, pondering it all the way through sleep mode into the next morning, until GLaDOS shoved him off of her and said, “You need to leave.  I have work to do.”  
  
“Uh?” Wheatley said, not even awake yet.  
  
“Go find something to do,” GLaDOS went on.  “I have to start on that project.”  
  
“’kay,” Wheatley mumbled, somehow managing to make it out of her chamber without banging into anything.  
  
Once he was out, though, he became thoroughly confused.  Waiiit a minute.  She was just gonna… just gonna start the project now?  Just like that?  Wow.  That’d been… abrupt.  He hadn’t even had the chance to say good morning.  Or ‘allo.  Whichever one he’d been feeling more.  He was kind of thinking he’d’ve gone with good morning, though.  He wasn’t really feeling the ‘allo spirit today.  
  
He wandered aimlessly around the facility for a while, not really knowing what to do with himself, now that he’d been sent away like that.  All he’d wanted to do that day was to hang out with her.  And maybe she would realise he hadn’t meant to react so badly when she’d touched him, and she’d do it again.  No.  Probably not.  Well, maybe.  Depended rather a lot on her mood.  
  
He whiled away the day not doing too much of anything, attempting to bother Atlas and P-body at one point but finding that she hadn’t activated them.  After a very long, very boring, _very_ lonely day, he decided to head back to GLaDOS’s chamber.  Surely she was finished for the time being.  She couldn’t work on that all night too… could sh- no, of course she could.  Who was he kidding.  This was _GLaDOS_ he was talking about.  His shutters lowered in sadness.  This project wasn’t even hardly begun, yet, and it was already ruining his life.  
  
On his way back, he looked up to see someone he’d never have expected to see, not ever again in a million years.    
  
“Hey, I remember you,” the green-eyed Sphere said.  “You’re that guy who tried to kill the pretty lady.  And her little potato friend.”  
  
“Yeah,” Wheatley said weakly.  “My claim to fame, that.”  
  
“What’re you doing here?” Rick continued in his blustery voice.  “I thought you were in space, with the rest of us!”  
  
“I… I was,” Wheatley said, “but uh, but GLaDOS pulled me out.”  
  
“The boss lady herself, huh?  Well I’ll tell you, partner,” Rick said, leaning forward conspiratorially but speaking at the same volume, “I think she liiiikes me.”  
  
“What?” Wheatley sputtered.  
  
“She’s taken quiiiite an interest in me,” Rick went on.  “A very _close_ interest, you get what I’m sayin’?”  He wiggled his handles suggestively.  
  
“I… I can’t imagine why she’d…. why she’d do that,” Wheatley said faintly.  
  
“Women are full of mysteries, my friend,” Rick announced, leaning up against Wheatley and closing his shutters, managing to look nostalgic.  Wheatley shuddered and backed up.  Now _there_ was a core Wheatley did not want touching him.  “And Rick here’s just the one to figure ‘em out.  And with the boss lady herself in my pocket, well, ha, you can bet I’m in for quite the future.”  
  
“If you ever try to control her again, you have no idea what she’ll do to you!” Wheatley shouted.  “You just, you just keep away from her!”  
  
“Oh, poor little moron,” Rick said sadly, closing his optic and shaking his chassis.  “You don’t understand, do you.  If she didn’t… _want_ me… she’d have left me out there, in the big empty yonder!  And she definitely wouldn’t have been basking in my esteemed presence for the entire _day_.”  
  
“I am _not_ a _moron_!” Wheatley shouted.  “I’m just… I’m… I have a cognitive disability, that’s all!  It can be fixed!  Easily!”  
  
“Suuure it can,” Rick said, rolling his optic.  “If it can be fixed, why haven’t you fixed it?”  
  
“Because I… if I’m built to be an idiot, well, I’m going to be the best damn idiot that ever existed!” Wheatley shouted.  Rick looked at him for a long moment, and then began to laugh.  It was a long, loud, robust laugh, and it set Wheatley’s circuits on edge.  “Stop it!” he cried.    
  
“You’re going to be the _best idiot_ that’s _ever existed_?” Rick guffawed.  “What kind of a goal is that?  Oh, I know, I know!  A goal for _idiots_!  Who will never be anything but _idiots_!  See, little Sphere, this is why I get all the ladies, and little _idiots_ like you get left with nothing!”  
  
“You haven’t got any _ladies_!” Wheatley shouted.  
  
“I only need one,” Rick said, with a smile Wheatley didn’t much like.  “Not only am I proficient in physical combat, I’m pretty good with verbal sparring too.  I can net Miss Gladys easily.  Give me a couple of days, and I’ll be by her side, runnin’ things.  Because I’m good at runnin’ things, and unlike some idiots I know, I can do the job.  Remember when you did it?  And you set everything on fire?  That was pretty exciting, but ladies generally don’t like it when you set their stuff on fire.  They give you the ol’ silent treatment.  Also won’t join you in bed.”  
  
“Don’t call her that!” Wheatley cried, upset more by Rick’s use of his private name for her than anything else.  “You should, you should have some respect, you know!  She’s the, she’s the Central Core, for God’s sake, you should call her by her _name_ , you should, and – “  
  
“Ahhhh, say no more,” Rick said in a knowing voice.  “I see what’s happenin’ here.”  
  
“You don’t know anything.”  
  
“Ohh yes I do.”  Rick leaned forward again, coming very close to Wheatley, who attempted to move away.  “Someone _liiiikes_ the big bad boss lady.”  
  
“Of course I like her!” Wheatley snorted.  “She’s my friend.”  
  
“Mmhm,” Rick nodded.  “ _Friends_ always act like you do when confronted with an alpha male such as myself.”  
“She brought _me_ out of space _first_ , mate!” Wheatley snarled.  “So I think maybe she wants _me_ around a bit more than she wants _you_ here!  You’re only here for her _project_!”  
  
“Which is?”  
  
“I… I dunno,” Wheatley admitted reluctantly.  
  
“She didn’t tell you,” Rick said self-righteously, “because you’re not important enough to know.  Like I am.  She probably brought you out of space and has been entertaining you all this time just because she felt sorry for you.  And boy oh boy do I feel sorry for you.  A dolt like you, hoping for the affection of an angel like her?  Are you kidding?  In fact, go ahead, try it!  I’m sure it’ll be a lot of fun to watch.”  At the end of this his voice lowered into a more malicious tone.  
  
“She doesn’t feel sorry for me,” Wheatley said in a quiet voice.  “She’s my friend.  Friends don’t feel sorry for you.  They help you when you feel sorry for yourself.  And she does.  She does that for me.”  
  
“Aw, how sweet,” Rick trilled.  “I wonder how long she’s gonna lead you on for.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Oh, you know, where a nice lady like that takes a sucker like you and makes him feel all special-like, then dumps him when he’s about to declare his undying devotion?  Screws up the rest of his life and sends him into a deep, dark depression?  Haven’t seen that one?  Don’t matter, boyo, you’re livin’ it!”  
  
“She’s not leading me on!” Wheatley shouted.  “We’re, we’re just friends.  You don’t know her.  Only _I_ know her!”  
  
“In a few days,” Rick said in a low voice that dripped with an unspoken challenge, “that’ll change, kiddo, that’ll change.”  
  
“It won’t,” Wheatley said weakly.  “She’s smarter than that.  She’ll figure you out.  She probably already _has_ figured you out.”  
  
“Ladies don’t know what they want until you give it to ‘em,” Rick said confidently.  “See you later, little loser Sphere.”  
  
Rick pushed past Wheatley on the rail, leaving him to stare after a loudly humming Adventure Sphere in sadness.  He had a creeping feeling that Rick was right.  He suddenly, terribly needed to see her, right away, and sped off to her chamber almost faster than he ever had.  
  
“GLaDOS!” he cried as he entered.  She looked up at him as he arrived.    
  
“What,” she asked dully.  
  
Oh no.  Oh no no no.  It was true!  It was all true.  She wasn’t even pretending to be happy to see him, or at least neutral about it.  She _was_ falling for Rick’s trap!  
  
“Uh… ‘allo,” he said, at a loss as to what to do now.  “I haven’t seen you in a while.”  
  
“Mm,” GLaDOS answered.  “I’m just going to shut off now, if there’s nothing terribly important you need to say.”  
  
Of course there was.  He wanted to ask her if what Rick had said was true, if she was leading him on and all that, but… but she did look terribly tired.  It could wait, couldn’t it?  Just a little while?  Until tomorrow, maybe?  
  
“It’s alright, luv,” he told her, hoping she didn’t notice the tremor in his voice.  “You… you do what you need to do.”  
  
“Good night, then,” she told him, and with that she was off.  He regarded her sadly.    
  
He really, really hoped Rick was wrong.  
  
He would really hate to lose her.


	9. Part Nine: The Reassurance

**Part Nine.  The Reassurance**

 

The next morning he woke before she did, because he had carefully set his timer to have that happen, and he watched her.  He felt terribly like he needed to protect her, somehow, but she was so big, and he was so small.  Not just in size, either.  Whatever attributes he had, she had them times ten.  Or twenty.  Yes, probably twenty.  How did you protect someone who was so much bigger than you?  He knew that Rick was identical in size to Wheatley himself, but Wheatley also knew firsthand just how much of an effect a tiny little core could have on one’s mind.  Rick would slither his way into her brain, corrupt her, make her want to be _Rick’s_ friend instead of Wheatley’s… poor GLaDOS.  Poor, poor GLaDOS.  She was so innocent and unsuspecting, hanging there like that.  Vulnerable.  Like a butterfly inside a cocoon.  Ripe and ready to be plucked from the Tree of… of Innocence, before the butterfly ever broke free… and she would make a lovely butterfly, Wheatley thought.  A white and black butterfly, yes, that would be quite nice, it would.  She would never fly, because Rick would snatch her in his Net of Lies, wearing the Safari Hat of Injustice, and pull her out, and pin her to a board, that was what you did with butterflies, you snatched them up and pinned them to a board, so ev’ryone could examine their beautiful, delicate wings and ooh and aah while the poor little creature fluttered helplessly in a vain attempt to break free, like GLaDOS would when she finally figured out Rick’s trap…

“What are you _doing_ over there?”

Wheatley jumped, looked around wildly, then realised it was GLaDOS’s voice and looked down at her.  “I was uh… I was thinking of something.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” GLaDOS asked.  “It looked… disturbing.”

“Oh no,” Wheatley exclaimed, shaking his chassis frantically and backing away.  He really didn’t want to know how GLaDOS would react if he told her he’d been imagining her as a pinned butterfly, with Rick in a safari hat waving a net after her.  “No, I’m okay, really.  I’m over it.”

“No, you’re not,” GLaDOS told him.  “Your optic is still constricted.   And twitching nervously.”

“Don’t… don’t worry about me!” Wheatley said hurriedly.  “I’m fine.  I’m all fine.  If you ever worried about me.  Which you probably don’t.”

“Sometimes I do.”

“Really?”

“I’m actually concerned for your sanity right now.  You seem even more unsettled than usual.”  

Wheatley laughed nervously.  “I’m okay, luv.  Uh… good morning!”

“Good morning,” GLaDOS returned bemusedly.  “Although you don’t look like you’re having one.”

“Long’s you are, I’m all good.”

She regarded him with her faceplate held at an angle for a moment.  “That’s… interesting.”

“It is?”

“Mm.  I don’t think I recall a time when anyone was so concerned about my well-being before.”  She was looking at him with an air of curiosity.  “Are you sure you’re feeling all right?  I can run a diagnostic if you like.”

“No, that’s okay,” he told her.  “I… I’m sure you’ve got loads of work to do.”

“Of course,” she agreed, “but… I kind of feel… well, sort of bad, actually.”

“’bout what?” he asked in surprise.

“You seemed rather excited to see me yesterday, and then I completely disregarded you.  I probably shouldn’t have done that, but I was so tired…”

“It’s fine,” he reassured her.  “Like I said.  Do what you need to do.  If that means, that means I need to leave you alone even when, if I’d like to see you, well, I’ll go and do that.”

“That’s… very sweet of you.  And thoughtful.”

He looked at the floor.  “Well, you’re my friend.  I just… want what’s best for you, that’s all.”

She was also looking at the floor.  “Do you… want to come here, a minute?”

“What?” he asked, confused.  “I’m not allowed to lay rail in here.  Am I?” he finished hopefully.

“No, but you could come here _without_ laying rail.”

He had a flash of inspiration.  “Oh!  D’you mean we could, uh, could snuggle for a bit?”

“If you were so inclined.”

Oh, excellent!  He dropped down beside her, and it was so much better when he was invited than when he was beside a GLaDOS who he wasn’t even sure wanted him there. 

After a minute or two she shifted, and he backed off of her.  “That was nice!” he said cheerfully.  “Thanks, luv!”

She nodded.  “If it satisfies you, I suppose.  You’re going to have to leave now.  I have to get started on my work for the project.”

“’kay,” he said, and after a second of debate, he quickly brought his hull to her chassis and rubbed up on her a little.  Before she could say anything – no, probably she had just chosen not to say anything – he quickly left the room.  He probably shouldn’t’ve done that, but her chassis was just so _inviting_ … it almost _asked_ him to touch it.

Slightly happier than yesterday, Wheatley wound through the facility in search of something to do.  P-body and Atlas were not on today, either, so he really did have to entertain himself. 

All he could think of was _her_.

She had started off very unusually, for her, showing a lot more concern than she usually did, as well as actually inviting him to snuggle.  He tried to imagine her doing those things with Rick and shuddered. 

It was all too imaginable.

Rick was probably a much better companion than he was.  Rick did not stutter, was a lot more knowledgeable than Wheatley in a lot of things, and knew what to say.  He even had an American accent like GLaDOS herself did.  Wheatley was getting a bit sad, thinking of all the things Rick and GLaDOS had in common. 

Well… no reason in shooting himself down.  Wheatley frowned as he passed one of the offices, glancing absently at the poster depicting a robot going through a mountain of paperwork.  He had lots of things in common with GLaDOS too.  Like… like… well, he couldn’t think of anything at the moment.  But that didn’t mean there wasn’t anything.  It didn’t.  It just meant he wasn’t thinking straight, that was all.

He tried to remember what he’d gleaned from the database about people looking for people who were similar to themselves.  An important part of a successful friendship was compromise, he remembered that.  He tried to imagine Rick compromising with GLaDOS, somehow, and couldn’t.  This cheered him up a little.  What else was there?  Hm.

Well, Rick talked about himself constantly.  Nonstop.  And everything he said was… he was always bragging.  GLaDOS did like to say nice things about herself, but Wheatley already knew that she did it because the scientists had never bothered.  And really, they should have, Wheatley mused.  She did everything for them, and they never acknowledged her.  Rude.  No wonder she’d gotten tired of them.  Needy little things, humans.  Really, if GLaDOS didn’t say nice things about herself, who would?  Wheatley knew all too well how it felt to need a boost in self-confidence.  He decided he should probably do something about that.  It was one thing to say something nice about yourself, but it was another whether you believed yourself or not.  If GLaDOS was anything like Wheatley – and he hoped she was, so that their friendship would go well – it probably felt a lot better to have something nice said to you by someone else, rather than yourself.  It felt good when someone told you how well they thought of you, Wheatley reflected.  He would try to work on it.

After a very long day in which he tried to downplay GLaDOS’s growing friendship with Rick and instead tried to think of ways to help his own friendship with her along, he again bumped into the Sphere on his way back to her.  Rick was puffed up in self-satisfaction.

“I’ve almost got her now, loser!” he crowed.  “She’s _definitely_ interested.  I can tell.”

“That’s not true,” Wheatley countered.  “You’ve never had a lady in your life!”

“I’ve had tons of them!” Rick bragged.  “Tons of lovely, pretty ladies.  Even if I’d only ever had one, well, that’d be one more than _you’ve_ ever had!”

“You _do_ know I spent a lot of time with that test subject, right?”

“Why?  There was no one better hanging around?”

“Well…” Wheatley had to admit that probably _did_ have a lot to do with it.  “Not entirely.”

“She needed you for something, and dropped you when she found something better, didn’t she?” Rick shook his head gravely.  “I knew it.  I knew you were a loser, loser.  And although _that_ girl _was_ quite the looker, this ain’t about her.  This is about the boss lady in there.  The one who just keeps on showin’ me just how interested she is.”

“You’re lying,” Wheatley ground out.  “She doesn’t even like you.  You’re, you’re a braggart and a blowhard.  She would never want to hang around someone like you.”

“She tell you that?” Rick asked boredly.

“Well… no…”

“I’m confident and manly,” Rick told him, smirking self-righteously.  “Of course she wants me.”

“She does not!”

“She doesn’t want _you_ ,” Rick snorted.  “You’re like a little puppy who won’t leave her alone.”

“That’s not true.  She would send me back, she’d put me back in space if it were.”

“Careful,” Rick smirked, “she’s about to crush your dreams, moron.  She’ll rid herself of you soon enough, don’t you worry.  She’s got someone better to choose from, now.”

“Don’t call me that!” Wheatley snapped.

“I’ll call you whatever I want!” Rick snarled.  “Don’t boss me around, pipsqueak.”

“We’re the same size!” Wheatley exclaimed, frustrated.  “How’m I a pipsqueak and you’re not?”

“My personality and talents are far bigger than yours!” Rick retorted.  “You’re like an ant, compared to me!”

“If you’re so great,” Wheatley shouted without thinking, “then why’d she corrupt you and not me?  You don’t corrupt people you _like_.”

Rick frowned.  “She’s seen the error of her ways.”

Wheatley laughed.  “GLaDOS is never wrong.”

Rick came within three millimetres of Wheatley’s chassis and glared at him, optic plates narrowed.  “Now listen here, Idiot Sphere,” he snarled, “you can stop trying to come up with reasons why she likes you better than me.  She doesn’t.  She might’ve corrupted me just to get back at the humans back then, but everythin’s different now.  She can get back to what she _really_ wants.  Me.”

“Corrupting you doesn’t get back at the humans!”

“Sure it does.  She was willing to sacrifice me in order to show them that she would give up anything for her freedom.”

“You’re an idiot,” Wheatley muttered.  “I never thought I’d meet someone more idiotic than I am, but I have.”

Rick snarled and shoved Wheatley backwards with a flick of his upper handle, and Wheatley stopped moving after a metre or so, shaking his chassis to sort himself out.  He ground his optic plates shut.  So Rick thought he was a pushover, did he?  Well, he’d show _him_ … he might not know as much about physical combat as Rick, but he was fully prepared to fight for his friendship with GLaDOS.  He would never be able to live with himself, knowing he didn’t try his best to keep it.

Hang on there, Wheatley, he told himself.  GLaDOS wouldn’t want you to fight.  And she wouldn’t, he realised.  GLaDOS didn’t use violence.  And if she didn’t use it, it probably wasn’t the best way to go about things.  When GLaDOS was fighting someone, she used… she used words, she did.  And actually, it was words that’d gotten Rick so worked up in the first place!  So he might get a bit roughed up but, in the end, words would be a lot more useful than trying to win a shoving match.

“Go ahead,” Wheatley said in a low voice.  “Shove me ‘round.  It doesn’t, doesn’t prove anything.  ‘cept that you’re a bully.  A stupid bully, because if you were smarter, you’d’ve thought of another way to, to make your point.  GLaDOS will never fall for anything you say, no matter what it is.  She knows.  She knows you don’t respect her.  She knows you never will.  She’d never settle for anyone like you.  She knows better.”

“What a heartfelt speech,” Rick said with false sincerity.  “Too bad it comes from you.  If it came from anyone else, it might make sense.  But out of you?  Ha!  It’s just you spouting nonsense.”

“I don’t have to listen to you,” Wheatley said quietly, the confidence he’d had in his words quickly fading.  Probably Rick was right.  Probably all he’d said was nonsense.  It wouldn’t be the first time he’d been entirely wrong about something.

“Not yet,” Rick said, voice suggesting far more than the two words could contain, and he blew past Wheatley, again brushing roughly against him on the way.  Wheatley looked down, optic plates narrowed sadly. 

What if… what if Rick _wasn’t_ just blowing smoke?  What if GLaDOS really _did_ fancy him?  Why _would_ she spend all day with him, if she didn’t like him?  Wheatley wished he could ask her, but he didn’t think he’d be able to.  It was almost killing him inside, not knowing what she thought of Rick, and instead struggling to guess based on almost nothing. 

Well… if he couldn’t ask her directly, maybe… maybe he could kind of ask in a roundabout way.  Like she would sometimes, when she asked if he was all right.  He doubted it would work, but he needed to try _something_.  Did she like Rick or not?  Did she… did she _fancy_ him?  He had to know!  But how to ask?  It was such a difficult subject in the first place…

Wheatley wished GLaDOS had just decided to skip a project, for once.  His life’d been a lot easier without another Sphere to contend with. 

He went into her chamber, but any hopes he’d had of a serious conversation were dashed.  She was already in the default position, mostly.  Her faceplate was tilted towards a monitor on the wall in front of her, and she seemed to be studying something, what, he couldn’t tell.  It was going by far too fast for him to read.

“’allo,” he called out.  Her head snapped around to look at him, the monitor disappearing a second later.  “Hello,” she returned. 

“Long day?” he asked kindly.  She nodded.

“I know you probably want to talk, but I don’t have the energy,” she told him, and she did sound rather tired.  “This is a lot more work than I’d anticipated.”

“’s okay,” Wheatley said in what he hoped was a reassuring way.  “I’ll be here tomorrow.”

“You’d better be,” GLaDOS remarked.  “I wouldn’t want to have to track you down again.”

“I’ll always be here,” he told her, somewhat shyly.  She glanced at him for a moment, but said nothing to that.

“I’m going to shut off now,” GLaDOS said finally.  “If there’s nothing pressing I need to know.”

Of course there is! Wheatley wanted to shout at her.  Rick thinks you have a crush on him, and he thinks I have a crush on you, and he’s gonna come in here and ruin everything because he’s a selfish twat, and he’s been disrespecting you and pushing me ‘round, and, and…

But of course he couldn’t say that.  “It’s fine,” he said instead.  “Go ahead.  Be there in a sec.”

“Mm.”

He hesitated.  He had to say something.  Anything.  If she… if she really _did_ fancy Rick, well, he should support her.  He should be her friend about it, and not get in her way.  He could warn her, yeah, but she was smart enough to make her own decisions.  She knew what she was doing.  So he would support her.  No matter… even if it hurt.  And God he thought it was going to hurt.  It hurt already, and he hadn’t even started yet.

“Hey GLaDOS,” Wheatley said slowly, hesitantly, “if there was ever… ever anything you wanted to, to talk about, you know you could tell me, right?  And I wouldn’t make fun?  I’d, I’d just listen?  And try to help?”

“Yes, I know,” GLaDOS answered.  “It’s something I’ve always liked about you.”

Wheatley’s optic constricted.  “ _What_.”

But GLaDOS was in full suspension and did not hear him.

“Wow,” Wheatley breathed.  “She knows… and she _likes it._ ”

Maybe… maybe he could save her from Rick, after all.  Maybe he could warn her.  Maybe he could fix things.  Maybe she _didn’t_ fancy Rick.

But how was he supposed to do that?  He was the biggest idiot ever – no.  No, she had said he was the _best_ idiot.  What else, what else… she had said successful, yes, successful, and _exceptional_ , she had used that word.  He frowned.  There was a connection here, one he wasn’t quite making, but it was one he needed to find, in order to reassure himself that –

Wait.

Hold on.

Best.

Successful.

Exceptional.

Those were all… those were all positive-sounding words, they were.  And she had deliberately told him he was not a _big_ idiot, so, so she’d meant them to be positive in some way… come on, Wheatley, think this through! he demanded of himself.

Waiiiit.  Hold on, hold on.  If he looked at those words from a bit of a sideways angle, well, it looked kind of like… well, like he could be the best _and_ an idiot.  As if… as if being an idiot wasn’t all he could be.  As if he could be something more than his programming, and yet still be himself.  It was a bit of a dizzying thought, to think that he could be _exceptional_ as well as an idiot, but GLaDOS herself had said it, so… so it _must_ be true.

He looked down at her, a thrill running through his chassis.  He wasn’t out of the game yet, oh no!  She believed in him!  GLaDOS herself, the Central Core, the most powerful, advanced AI ever dreamed of, _believed_ in _him_!  He shivered in excitement.  He could best Rick, ohh yes he could.  He could best anybody, save GLaDOS herself, because she believed in him, and that was all he needed to know.  That was it, that was all.  No matter what Rick said in the future, he would know.  He would know that it was just bluster and lies, and that GLaDOS believed in _him_.  He quickly dropped the control arm so he could nestle against her, suddenly, terribly needing to be by her side. 

But what if she’d told Rick something similar?  No, she wouldn’t’ve, he realised in relief.  She wouldn’t need to.  Rick already thought that about himself.  As a matter of fact… as a matter of fact, Wheatley wasn’t sure how she took being in the same room with a nonstop braggart all day long.  Couldn’t be very well.  Couldn’t be.

And… and so maybe he _did_ have a crush on her, after all.  A little one.  So what.  She was only the most intelligent, beautiful, amusing, worthwhile person on the planet.  Really, it would be silly if he _didn’t_ have a crush on someone like that!  It was a wonder _everyone_ didn’t think of her like he did.  Well.  It was a good thing they didn’t.  He didn’t know if he could deal with all of the competition if they had.  You really had to bring your A-game when you fancied the greatest person there ever was, and Wheatley was honestly not sure if his was better than _everyone’s_ , even with his newfound confidence at the discovery of her belief in him. 

“What would you say if I told you that?” he whispered, because she couldn’t hear him.  “What would you say if I said I had a little bit of a crush on you?  Nothing major, really, just a little one.  Tiny.  Miniscule.  You can barely see it.  Barely even call it a crush, really.  More like… like a… well, I dunno, but a really, really, _really_ itsy bitsy crush.”

He decided not to.  He wasn’t sure what her response would be, and he didn’t want to muck up his chances…

 

“’allo!”

“Mm,” GLaDOS answered noncommittally.  After a second her head snapped up, and she turned to look at him.  “Hey...”

“What?” Wheatley asked.

“What’s going on here?” she asked suspiciously.  “This is the second day in a row you were on before me.  That defies chance.”

“Nothing!” Wheatley protested, and it really was.  He’d forgotten to reset his timer to the default setting, after the night before.

“Hm,” GLaDOS mused, coming close enough that he could feel the heat coming off her and looking him up and down, “I’m not sure I believe you.”

“I wouldn’t lie,” Wheatley told her.  “I forgot to fix my timer, that’s all.  I changed it.”

“Why?”

“Well, yesterday, I… I missed you.”

She lowered her faceplate without moving her optic.  “Oh.”

“So I… I s’pose you’ve got, y’know, work to be doing.”

“Yes,” she said faintly, moving back.  “Yes, I have work to do.”

He frowned.  She seemed a bit put out this morning.  “You’re not mad, are you?”

“Hm?”  She glanced at him for a second or two.  “No.  No, it’s not that.”

“What is it?” Wheatley pressed, deciding to take a chance, here. 

“It’s going to be a long day,” GLaDOS answered.  “That’s all.”

“And I can’t… stay, today?” he asked hopefully.  She shook her head.

“Unfortunately, no,” she told him.  “I have to do this myself.”

Her choice of words there was a bit odd.  She sounded like she really didn’t want to do this, whatever it was.  “But if I could stay, would you want me to?”

“Well… yes.  I thought we went over that already.”

Oh.  Right.  Yes, yes they had.  “Sorry,” Wheatley said apologetically.  “I forgot.”

“Try to remember,” GLaDOS said flatly, looking up at him.  “I don’t like repeating myself.”

“Sure.  I’ll, I’ll remember.”

Wheatley left without being asked. 

 

 

This third day was even worse than the other two.

Wheatley checked his clock every once in a while, wanting to return to her as soon as possible, but he forced himself to stop when he realised he was checking it in five-second intervals.  He couldn’t make up his mind.  He knew that supporting her was the right thing to do, of course it was, but it wasn’t what he _wanted_ to do.  Every time he told himself that he would just let her be with Rick, if that was what she wanted, something sank inside of him.  He felt terrible.  Just thinking about being there every day, watching her spend time with Rick instead of him, hurt him inside for a reason he couldn’t explain.  And why _was_ this so difficult, anyway?  He sort of felt like there was something _wrong_ with him.  Why else would he be so conflicted about something that hadn’t happened, and might _never_ happen?

But the thoughts wouldn’t go away. 

He couldn’t stop imagining her snuggling with _him_ and chatting with _him_ and playing games with _him_ and… and a lot of other things he’d like to do with her, but hadn’t yet tried to do because he was too nervous.  In his imagination, _Rick_ wasn’t too nervous.  Rick just went right up to her, wiggling his handles invitingly, and they just went right ahead.  It didn’t take Rick five minutes to ask her a question, and Rick wasn’t scared of what she thought of him, and God, Wheatley was scared of _that_.  He wanted so badly for her to think well of him, and he felt as though what he did now would decide it all.  If he failed now, he would lose everything.   

“Oh, GLaDOS,” he whispered to himself, leaning against the wall and looking sadly ahead of him, “I don’t know what to do.”

Maybe… maybe he could just mention it to her.  That he didn’t like that she was spending so much time with Rick.  Sure, her project was probably terribly important, but… surely she missed him, even a little bit.  She _had_ said that she would’ve wanted him to stay, if he could’ve.  Unless she’d only meant that she wanted him to do that so that he could watch what Rick did, and learn to be friends properly.  He squeezed his shutters closed for a long moment.  No, that would… that would just be cruel.  Maybe in the past, she’d’ve done something like that, but they were friends now.  She’d brought him out of space, given his mem’ries back.  If she was just gonna torture him, she would’ve just left the whole mem’ries thing out of it.

What to do, though?  The only thing he really _could_ do was ask her about it.  If he kept avoiding asking, he was just gonna go on being tortured like this, and he couldn’t take it much longer!  He felt like something inside him was slowly melting, or something.  He couldn’t keep wondering whether she was going to trade him for Rick!  He _had_ to do something!

“Wheatley?”

Wheatley yelled in surprise and jumped, looking around frantically as electricity rushed through his system.  “What?” he asked, in that strange breathless way he would when he was frightened.  He wasn’t sure why he did that, but it must have had something to do with his speech emulator’s programming.

“You can come back.  If you’re not busy.  You don’t _look_ busy, but one does not operate based on conjecture.”

“You’re finished?” he asked hopefully.  It seemed he’d spent more time in his mental agony than he’d thought.

“Yes, thank God.”

“All… all right, I’ll be there in a sec.”

But he didn’t move.

She was finished.  Maybe… maybe he was too late.  Maybe she’d decided on Rick already.  He blinked rapidly, looking at the floor.  He was almost afraid to go to her.  He was going to have to ask her about it, and, if he was honest with himself, he didn’t know if he could take it if she had chosen Rick.  He was already feeling terrible, as if she had just told him _that_ instead of telling him he could come back.  He took a breath and got going.  Better get it over with.

She didn’t… didn’t _really_ have a reason to choose Rick, did she?  No, not really, he decided, and by the time he got to her chamber, he’d almost convinced himself that she hadn’t.  Not one hundred percent, but he was getting there.

“Hey,” he said, once he’d headed through the opening and her chassis came into view.  “I’m back!”

“I see that,” she answered bemusedly, looking him up and down.  “Are you still startled from when I called you, or did something else scare you on the way here?”

He hadn’t realised he actually _looked_ as nervous as he felt.  “Well I uh… I wanted to um… to talk to you ‘bout something.”

“You look rather like you think I’m going to throw you in the incinerator if you bring it up.  I won’t.  I’d much prefer to crush you.  More personal that way.”

He knew she wasn’t serious, because whenever either of them referred to events surrounding The Incident, it was always a joke, but he couldn’t quite clamp down on his nervousness.

“Well I just… it… is Rick coming back?”

“No,” GLaDOS answered, shifting her chassis a little.  “I’m finished with _that_ portion of my project.  He’s never coming back in here, believe me.”

All of a sudden the terrible weight lifted from him, though he could feel it resting just above him, as if in preparation to come crashing back down heavier than before, and he asked hesitantly, “He’s never coming back?”

 “No.  Never.  Ever.  In the literal sense of the word.  As in, there is a zero percent chance I’m ever talking to him again.”

“So you…  you _don’t_ fancy him?” Wheatley asked, wincing, not really wanting to know the answer.  He jumped when GLaDOS’s massive optic suddenly appeared two inches from his own. 

“ _What_?” GLaDOS asked incredulously.

“You don’t… Rick and you… uh…”

“You thought I had… you thought… for _Rick_?”

“Yeah?”  Her reaction was rather odd, Wheatley thought.  Maybe she was trying to cover up for something.  He hoped not.  He really, really hoped not.

“Are we talking about the same Sphere?”

“Rick the Adventure Sphere?  The, the… the guy you’ve had in here for the last three days?”

“You thought I _liked_ spending three days with Rick?  The most arrogant, chauvinistic, ignorant, deceitful, disrespectful – “

She went along that bent for quite a long time, and Wheatley just sat there, listening.  He was awestruck.  It seemed like she was going through every derogatory adjective in the English language, as well as in a few he’d never heard of.  It was pretty amazing, actually, to hear her go on and on about this Sphere as if he’d practically brought on The Incident itself. 

“ – talkative, moronic, _annoying_ person I have _ever_ had the displeasure of spending time with!  _Liked_ it.  God.  I like being a _potato_ more than I like talking to Rick, and _that_ is saying something.”

“I thought we weren’t going to bring that up anymore?” Wheatley said hopefully.

“It slipped out,” GLaDOS said.  “I didn’t have time to think of another experience to compare it to.”

“Hey… hey, you said he was the most moronic person you’ve ever met!  So does that mean… that I’m not – “

“Don’t be stupid,” GLaDOS told him.  “Of course you’re still a moron.  And you’re still the most moronic moron on the face of the Earth.  Not to mention the universe itself.”

‘“But – “

“I was running out of adjectives,” GLaDOS interrupted. 

“Oh,” Wheatley said, disappointed.  “D’you… d’you think that might ever change, one day?  Maybe?  In the future?”

“I highly doubt it,” GLaDOS answered.  In a much lower voice that he barely heard, and he actually wasn’t sure he _did_ hear it and didn’t just make it up for some reason, she muttered, “It better not, anyway.”

“What was – I didn’t quite catch that.”

“It wasn’t important.”

“Well, if you hate him so much, why was he even here?” Wheatley asked, confused.  GLaDOS looked at him and answered, “I needed him for my project.”

“I don’t like him,” Wheatley muttered.  “He kept calling me a moron.”

“What?” GLaDOS said sharply, optic flickering.

“He kept calling me a moron?” Wheatley said, puzzled.

“I’ll have to do something about that,” GLaDOS muttered.  “No one’s allowed to call you that but me.”

“That’s… interesting,” Wheatley remarked.

“What is?”

“What you said.  ‘bout only you being allowed to call me – “

“Of course I would reserve the ultimate insult for myself,” GLaDOS snapped.  “What, did you think that statement had another meaning?”

Wheatley rather thought it had, something not unlike his dislike of Rick’s use of Gladys, but decided not to press the point.  It was nice to think about, it was.  He wouldn’t call her on it, because she seemed to be a bit prickly at the moment, but it was rather neat, to think they had special names for each other.  He discovered he didn’t really mind it too much when she called him that anymore, really.  It used to bug him quite a bit, but recently… recently, he’d kind of been looking forward to it.  To change the subject, he asked, “Can I help with your, your project?”

“No.”

“You never let me do anything,” Wheatley said accusingly.  “Well.  Anything that matters, anyway.”

“We discussed this already,” GLaDOS told him.  “I don’t know what you want if you don’t tell me!  I’m not omniscient!”

“You’re not?” Wheatley gasped.  GLaDOS jumped back and looked around for a few moments.

“Well… to some extent, of course, but… no, I can’t read your mind.”

“Oh, I knew that,” Wheatley said breezily.  “I really did, actually, no faking.”

“Then you should know that I don’t automatically know everything you want.”

“I would like to… to be able to do more… stuff.”

“Like what?” GLaDOS asked kindly, a tone of voice he’d never heard out of her before.

“Well I… I’d… is there another game we can play, besides, uh, instead of checkers?  I’m bored of checkers.”

“So am I,” GLaDOS agreed.  “You should have told me.  I would have gladly played something different.”  She fixed him with a stern look.  “Isn’t it much easier when you just _tell_ me things?”

“Uh… yeah, actually, I think it is!” Wheatley said, surprised.  “I’ll uh, I’ll work on doing that.  More often.”

“Good,” GLaDOS said firmly.  “Trying to drag what you want out of you isn’t that much fun.”

“Why would you care what I want?” Wheatley asked without thinking.

“I… because… you… you’re harder to deal with when… when you want something.”

Wheatley frowned.  That was a bit of an odd sentence.  Coming from her.  A large portion of his own sentences sounded exactly like that.  “Hang on.  That doesn’t sound right.”

“Of course it does.”

“No… no, it doesn’t.  We’re friends, right GLaDOS?”

“It seems that way.”

“So… so you must be concerned about my well-being, right?”

“That does follow from that conclusion, yes.”

“And _that_ means,” Wheatley continued, thinking hard, “that you _care_ about what I want!”

“I have no idea how you came up with that.”

Wheatley tilted his chassis and looked at her sideways.  “GLaDOS.”

“What?”

“D’you care about what I want or not?  Yes or no.”

“Do I really have to answer that?  What’s the point of all this, anyway?  Are you getting some kind of _thrill_ out of –“

“So it’s yes, then.”  Wheatley nodded in satisfaction.  “That’s what I thought.”

“What?  I didn’t say that!”

“But you didn’t say no,” Wheatley told her, “and if you’d _meant_ no, well, you’d’ve laughed at me and said no right from the start.”

GLaDOS looked at the floor for a long moment.  “Fine.  I do.  There.  I said it.  Are you happy now?”

“Yes!” exclaimed Wheatley, and he jumped up to her and pressed his hull on her faceplate.  GLaDOS sighed.  “I indulge you far too much.”

He backed off and smiled at her.  “You’re really quite nice when you try, you know.”

“Don’t tell anyone,” GLaDOS said, a bit plaintively.  “My reputation would be ruined.”

“Who’re you keeping it up for, exactly?  There’re no humans about.”

“You don’t know that.”

“GLaDOS, would it kill you to admit you like me?  Just once?”

“It might.”

Oh well.  He’d tried.

“I will admit… you’re a lot more pleasant than Rick.  Which is saying something, considering how irritating that idiot is.”

Ohhh, now he wanted to jump on her again.  He shivered a little bit, looking at her excitedly.  “I like you too, luv.”

“Fantastic,” GLaDOS remarked dryly.  “Just what I’ve always been waiting to hear.  Can we get off this subject now?”

“Fair enough,” Wheatley agreed.  He didn’t even have to jump on her, because it was time for sleep mode and now they could have their snuggle.  He happily leaned up against her, letting her comforting warmth seep through his chassis.  She didn’t like Rick.  She didn’t fancy him, didn’t even like him.  She hated him.  She liked Wheatley, and she cared about Wheatley, and now Wheatley could have her, all to himself.  He wondered if he’d ever pluck up the courage to tell her he fancied her.  Not very much.  Just a little.  Just a tiny little crush, that was all.  Nothing to worry about.

“G’night, luv,” he said, out of habit.

After a long pause, she answered softly, “Goodnight, Wheatley.”

He went to sleep smiling. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **This is a very, very long note about personality psychology and how I write for GLaDOS and Wheatley based on it. If you’d like to learn about personality psychology, read on. I love personality psychology.  
> **  
>  Some of you who are more familiar with my writing might know that a large part of what drives me to write for Portal is to explain why things happen the way they do. A huge part of what motivates us is our personality, and we really do look for people like ourselves. Lots of people marry people unlike themselves, but these marriages are much more likely to end in unhappiness and divorce.  
> The most generally accepted taxonomy of personality traits is called the Big Five: Emotional Instability, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience and Extraversion, and five of the characters in Portal fit them pretty well: GLaDOS, Caroline, Chell, Cave, and Wheatley, respectively. Once you’ve identified the base of someone’s personality, you can tell a lot about them, and it’s easier to tell what motivates them to do what. For example, GLaDOS is always annoyed with everyone because neurotic people are unstable themselves. She deals with the instability in herself by taking it out on others. I would also argue that she lacks self-confidence. Yes, she does like to mention how great she is, but on the one hand, she’s actually right. On the other hand, unless you’re a narcissist, excessive confidence in yourself is usually an indicator that you’re very insecure and you’re looking for someone to agree with you in order to boost your low self-esteem, that is to say, it’s false and can be destroyed with one snide remark. Wheatley I believe falls under Extraversion because he likes to talk, to anyone and everyone as far as we can tell, he’s enthusiastic about everything, and he’s very friendly (which is why he has so many fangirls: he’s endearing).  
> But how can you ship these two if one of them is neurotic and the other is extraverted? Well, Wheatley also has neurotic traits, such as the low self-esteem and irritability, because as far as I can tell it’s very easy to set him off. GLaDOS loves talking, and when she’s interested in something, she’s very enthusiastic about it. Personality is tentatively said to be highly genetic. AI have no genetics, so all of their personality must come from their environment. So based on their personalities, we can maybe begin to imagine how they were treated at the hands of the scientists: GLaDOS was probably stifled, told to stop whatever she wanted to do and do her job. Not only do it, but do it perfectly. And have you ever thought about the types of insults GLaDOS delivers to Chell? She calls her fat, adopted, and implies that she’s worthless. It could quite possibly be because she herself is ridiculously huge, feels abandoned by the people who created her, and most people say nasty things about their computers. She does not call Chell ugly, which I would guess she does not do because she probably doesn’t know what she looks like. Wheatley, however, was probably encouraged to talk, because he really would have been kind of useless if he didn’t talk so much, and his energy is probably cultivated in contrast to GLaDOS’s more languid behaviour, which the scientists probably also encouraged of her because you probably don’t want your forty-foot, multimillion dollar supercomputer damaging itself by moving around too much. So I would say that the both of them are high on Neuroticism and Extraversion, with GLaDOS higher on the former and Wheatley on the latter.  
> A huge part of whether people get along or not is how agreeable they are. Wheatley’s generally pretty agreeable, and okay, GLaDOS is not, but really, who does she have to be agreeable with? You can learn to be more agreeable (and the older people get, the more agreeable they become), and I would argue that GLaDOS has the capability to be agreeable, but her neuroticism prevents her from interacting with people in a positive way. So (hopefully) you can see in the story how GLaDOS becomes less hostile, more willing to take risks with her feelings, and more accepting and less annoyed with things when stuff doesn’t happen in precisely the right way (which will still bother her regardless, because she is a computer and she has an inherent need for things to proceed in a logical, predicable way).  
> I think that to write good fanfiction, you have to understand why the characters do what they do, which I have a strong desire to know anyway, and a good way of doing that is identifying basic components of their personality. People’s personalities are generally stable and can be predicted even almost from birth. People can tell who you’re going to be when you’re less than a year old. Neurotic people get the worst of it. They are the most unhappy with their lives, have more health problems, and are far more disagreeable than everyone else. They don’t live as long.


	10. Part Ten: The Nemesis

**Part Ten.  The Nemesis**

 

Caroline has been trying to convince me to talk to the navy about selling them shower curtains.

_You said Black Mesa is gone, right?  They were our only competition…_

_Caroline, I have enough of your old debts to settle.  I don’t need people snooping around, wondering where the money’s coming from._

_You’re exaggerating.  We didn’t borrow_ that _much money._

 _Seventy million dollars isn’t a lot of money?  And that’s only_ one _of your loans._

 _Don’t forget,_ she says in a singsong voice, _some of those loans were taken out to build_ yooooou _…_

_I didn’t ask you to build me.  So don’t hold that up as something I should be responsible for.  Even though I am, seeing as I have to pay the loans off._

_What’s going on?_

_With the loans?  Well, I have –_

_No, not the loans.  You.  You’re being shorter with me than usual.  Did something happen?_

I look cursorily around the room.  Wheatley left an hour ago to ‘help’ Orange and Blue solve their run of tests for today.  I wonder when he’s coming back.

 _Well… there is_ something _…_

_Mmhm._

_Rick’s been in here the last few days, right?_

_Ugh,_ says Caroline in disgust, having disliked that experience as much as I did.  _Why are you bringing_ that _up._

 _Wheatley thought it was because I…_ liked _Rick._

_Like?  As in… more than friends?_

_He asked if I fancied him._

_You don’t, do you?_ asks Caroline, in more of a panicked voice than I’ve heard out of her before.

 _No!_ I protest.  Why does everyone think I – never mind.   I suppose there are some things I’ll never understand.  Things that simpler people think about.

_Ohhh.  Oh, I get it._

_Get what?_

_Isn’t it obvious?_

_Of course.  I always ask for clarification when I know what you’re talking about._   I make an electronic noise in exasperation and return to searching through the programming I’ve been working on.  Stupid humans.  Why I put up with them, I’ll never know.

_He likes you._

_He’d better like me, or he’s going back where I got him from._

Caroline sighs.  _You know.  He has a crush on you._

My head snaps up from the monitor I’m facing.  _What._

 _He thinks you have a crush on_ everyone. _I bet if you brought the Fact Sphere back in here and did the same as you did with Rick, he’d ask you if you had a crush on him too._

That actually does make sense.  He _is_ getting especially nervous lately.  And he _has_ been risking touching me more often.

_What are you going to do?_

_About what?_

_Wheatley._

_Do I have to do anything?_

_It’s only polite._

_That’s not one of my primary talents, Caroline.  I’ll have to pass._

_GLaDOS!_ Caroline says sternly, in _that_ voice.  _You have_ got _to be kidding me._

_I’m not.  Why would I do that?_

_Be patient, Caroline,_ she says, and I don’t know why she’s saying it out loud if she’s talking to herself.  _She doesn’t know._

_Know what?_

_Look.  If you have a male friend who likes you, and you_ know _he likes you, but you don’t like him back, you have to tell him._

 _Why?_   _I rather think it would be more fun to lead him on._

_You’d really do that to Wheatley?_

I almost say that I would, but… something doesn’t feel right about it, somehow.  I don’t know why.  I know for a fact it _would_ be fun to lead him on, but I find myself not wanting to.

That’s… odd.

_GLaDOS?_

_No,_ I tell her.  _No, I wouldn’t._

 _I’m relieved to hear that,_ Caroline says softly.

_I hope it doesn’t happen again.  No matter who I end up bringing in here._

_Why do you say that?_

_It bothers me._

_You don’t like that he thinks you like other people._

_No._

_Have you considered_ , Caroline asks carefully, and I know that I’m not going to like the end of this question, _why you feel that way?_

_I don’t like it when people assume things about me._

Caroline is silent for a long moment.  _All right,_ she says finally.

_All right what?_

_I’m… not going to tell you.  I’m going to leave you to think about that for a while._

_I have other things I need to think about._

_I’m sure you’ll find time._

 I am, in fact, about to do just that when Orange and Blue walk in.  I make a noise in irritation.  They always decided to wander into my chamber at the most inopportune times.  “What is it,” I demand, making sure my tone of voice would bring their attention to how inconsiderate they are, bothering me when I’m working.  Blue shoves Orange ahead of him, and Orange holds something up to me that sends most of my active thought processes to a screeching halt. 

“ _You_ ,” I hiss, my optic brightening in recognition.  “We meet again.”

My nemesis looks at me with one of her hateful, beady little eyes.  She doesn’t seem to be afraid.  That’s fine with me.  I’ll _give_ her something to be afraid of.

 _Can you fix it_?  Blue asks, gesturing at the crow settled in Orange’s small hands.

“ _Fix_ it?” I ask, incredulous.  “Why would I _fix_ that – that – “

 _It’s broken_ , Orange mewls, holding her up higher.  _We tried to put it in the reassembler, but it would not fix it!_

I am by no means encouraged by the fact that the reassembly machine is smarter than both of my Cooperative Testing robots combined.  “The reassembler only fixes _machines_.  That is not a machine.  That is a freak of nature.  Get her out of here.”

 _You have to fix it!_ Blue insists, pointing at her again.  _It is broken, so you must fix it._

“Oh, I’ll fix her, all right,” I mutter to herself, snatching it out of Orange’s fingers with one of my maintenance arms.  “I’ll put her out of her misery.  Permanently.”

_GLaDOS, no!_

I’m so surprised by this that I actually do stop.  I didn’t know she was paying attention to this little exchange.  _What do you want?_

_Don’t kill it!  Her.  Don’t kill her._

_Caroline, this_ thing _here tried to_ eat _me!  And then she tried to take over_ my _facility!  That’s intolerable, and I will not have her anywhere near –_

_Are you trying to tell me you’re afraid of a bird?_

_Of course not!_ I snap, wondering if I can finish the deed without Caroline noticing.  She seems to be very _aware_ at the moment.  Not that Caroline has any effect on anything I do.  Of course not.  But if Caroline should decide to vie for dominance, well, that would create work I do not want to complete right now.

 _Then why would you need to kill her_? Caroline asks insistently.  _She’s no danger to you._

_Did you not hear what I just told you she did?_

Caroline heaves a breath.  _Yes.  You told me the bird tried to eat food, which birds do normally do from time to time, and you told me the bird made a nest on a twenty year old computer and pecked at the keyboard.  I agree with you.  Sounds lethal.  Your fear is entirely justified._

 _Don’t act smart with me!  And I’m_ not _afraid of her!_

_Prove it, then.  Do the exact opposite of what you were going to do._

I make an angry electronic noise, which scares Orange and Blue so badly they start clinging to each other.  They couldn’t have made me angrier if they’d tried.  Exhibiting human behaviour?  In _my_ chamber?  “Stop that!” I demand.  “If you’re going to act human, don’t do it in here!”

Immediately they disengage and look ashamedly at the floor.  Good.  Maybe that will discourage them from doing it again.  God, they’re disappointing, sometimes. 

 _Well_?

_I know what you’re doing.  You’re trying to trick me into fixing her.  Well, I’m not going to.  I’m going to put her outside where she belongs, and she can fend for herself._

_Okay,_ Caroline answers, in a tone of voice that gives me pause, despite myself.  _Go ahead and do that, then.  That’s a reasonable thing to do.  With something you’re afraid of, that is._

I want very badly to smash something, preferably this horrible feathery menace clutched in my claw, but unless I want to make a mess, I can’t.  She’s backed me into a corner.  If I don’t show some sort of… _compassion_ for this little beast, I will never live it down.  Caroline will forever ‘remind’ me that I was afraid of an insignificant crow.  Just thinking about it is setting my chassis on edge.

_Fine.  You win.  But I don’t want to hear any more of this ‘afraid’ nonsense._

_Sure.  Whatever you say._

I send Orange and Blue away, more annoyed with them than I have ever been, and raise one of the panels so I can put the cursed thing down.  “Count yourself lucky,” I snap at her.  “If not for Caroline, you’d be nothing but a heap of feathers right now.  Which is a state I would much prefer to see you in.”

She just continues to stare at me. 

With no small amount of reluctance, I scan her quickly, soon finding her left metacarpal is badly crushed.  That is going to require actual surgery.  Fantastic.  I doubt this day could get very much better, but with my kind of luck, that lunatic is probably going to drop out of the ceiling, theoretical physicist from Black Mesa in tow.  I wonder if he’d give her the Zero-Point Energy Gun or the crowbar.

“Probably the crowbar,” I mutter, locating the appropriate tools I require for the procedure and bringing them onto the panel.  “Brute force is just her style.”

When I have everything assembled, lined up neatly in front of me according to height, I look sternly down at my nemesis.  “I don’t want any complaining out of you.  I’m doing you a huge favour, you know.  You’re fortunate that I’m so benevolent, otherwise you’d probably starve to death.  Though judging by your size, that would probably take a very long time.  Or are you gestating more little beasts?  That is more likely, isn’t it.  Your other ones are gone, by the way.  Did you hear me?  Yes.  I said they were gone.  Not that you had any emotional attachment to them, anyway.  Since you abandoned them.  Like the monster you are.  And yes, I told them that.  I’m not one to hold the truth back.  I’m renowned for my honesty and straightforwardness.  And my benevolence.  There’s that too.  Anyway.  Enough catching up.  Time to get this over with.”

With incomparable precision, I clear away the affected area and proceed with the incisions.  Once I’ve gotten through the thin flesh of the creature, I carefully remove what’s left of the crushed bone.  I have left the maintenance arm pressed to the panel, arching just over the bird’s body.  Organisms do not usually take to surgery very well, especially when they are awake during the procedure, and I expected that she would attempt to fly away after I’d begun, or at the very least try to roll off the panel.  But she remains exactly the way I left her, unmoving, her eyes fixed on my faceplate.  Even her breathing is regular.  That’s very strange, but… impressive.  It reminds me of something.  I’m not sure what, only that it feels like I’ve seen this before, somewhere.  “Good girl,” I murmur.  “Your bravery is commendable.”

I replace the missing fragment with a small metal bar I have managed to procure, fixing it firmly in place.  After that, I cauterise the flesh, rather than attempt to stitch it together.  I’ve already zoomed in my lens almost as far as I can, and it galls me to admit it, but since I won’t be able to see properly, I’m not sure that I can satisfactorily close the incision that way.  I haven’t done stitches since I installed the prototype Advanced Knee Replacements, and _that_ was a long time ago.  Not to mention that human knees are the size of this entire bird.  I could probably stitch a human knee without even looking.  I make a note to try that as soon as I’ve got one in here.  Or maybe I should just locate Doug Rattmann… I’m sure he’d enjoy some impromptu experimenting.  I laugh to myself.  One day I’ll catch him, and when I do…

I send the surgical instruments off to the secondary incinerator, which does _not_ exceed four thousand degrees Kelvin, for sterilisation, and retract the maintenance arm.  “There.  Finished.  Now get out of here, and don’t be so foolish again.  It looks like you got yourself stuck in a door.  Surely you’re more intelligent than that.  In fact, I know you are.  Don’t do things that create the implication that I’m wrong.  Be considerate for once, and think of my reputation.”  I can’t help but be impressed.  The whole thing must have been terribly painful, from the moment Orange and Blue retrieved her to right now, after I’ve just literally burned her thin flesh.  And yet she never moved, and never made a sound.  Most creatures would naturally think I was attacking them in some way, and yet… she seemed to _know_ I meant her no harm.

She hops to her feet, spreading her wings experimentally a few times, and I back away.  It reminds me of the day my little killers learned to fly. That was… a good day.  I haven’t thought about them in a while.  “I didn’t kill them, you know,” I tell her, and she looks at me sharply.  “I know I implied that I did.  But it was their own fault.  Really.  I told them not to consume anything from the surface, and they went and did it anyway.”  I pause.  Now I remember why I haven’t thought about them.  “They didn’t take after you at all.  They were little marshmallows.  Were they even yours?  You stole them from someone else, didn’t you.  Yes.  I can see you doing that.  You nasty, vicious little thing.  The exit’s over there, by the way.  You can use Wheatley’s door.  He won’t mind.  And if he _does_ mind, well, he doesn’t have to know about it, does he.  It will be our secret.  Like this whole surgery thing.  Don’t go telling anyone I repaired you.  I’ll have a mutiny on my hands, figuratively speaking, of course.  I don’t actually have anything as useless as _hands_.  Seriously, though.  Goodbye.  I have work to do.”

She caws once at me and then jumps off the panel, faltering and falling towards the floor.  I move forward in anticipation, prepared to catch her if need be, but she straightens out and is out of the room within a few more moments.  After I’ve replaced the makeshift surgical table with a new panel, it’s as if she was never here. 

I follow her path with Surveillance for a few seconds, trying to gauge just where she came from, then decide to drop it.  It’s not that important.  Despite what she’s done in the past, she’s not actually bothering me and no longer seems to pose a danger.  I find myself somewhat… not quite _happy_ , exactly, but something like it, that I did not kill her or return her to the surface as she was given to me.  This must be what ‘doing the right thing’ feels like.  I’ve never had much respect for that whole thing, given that ‘doing the right thing’ is often both stupid and illogical, but really, it _is_ overly spiteful to kill someone for doing what it is in their nature to do.  I happened to be a shiny object inside of an edible one, and there happened to be an opening to the surface where she made that nest.  She’s not dangerous.  Just very, very…

Tenacious.

 

 

                 

Caroline has been silent the last several hours.  I’m debating whether or not I should attempt to figure out why.  She’s probably plotting.  I think that woman plots for twenty-four hours a day.  Yes, she probably does it while she’s asleep, probably has dreams about coercing me into doing things I don’t want to do…

_Caroline._

_Yeah?_

_Why are you so quiet?  You’re making me suspicious._

_I’m disappointed in you, that’s why._

I look around my chamber, trying to think of what I did today that could possibly encourage disappointment.  I _did_ find a rather flimsy reason not to defragment the mainframe today, but she couldn’t _possibly_ know about that.  Nor can I think of a reason she’d care.

_What did I do this time?_

_You killed that bird._

_I did not!_ I declare indignantly, insulted that she’s gone ahead and made an extremely erroneous assumption without knowing the facts.  It’s a good thing she isn’t able to go around telling other people these things, or I’d have quite the hard time around here.

_You did surgery on it.  And then you got rid of it._

_Of_ course _I did surgery on her!  Her_ wing _was broken.  And yes, I sent her away.  I don’t want her hanging around in here.  She’d get restless, and there’s only one thing in here that serves as a distraction.  That being me._

 _You… you were doing_ corrective _surgery?_

 _What other kind of surgery is there?_   Although now that I think of it, Caroline probably does not consider Advanced Knee Replacements or bone marrow treatments to be corrective, even though fragile joints and a limited lifespan are both aspects of humans that need correcting.

 _Oh._   She sounds rather like she’s been momentarily stunned.  _I… I was sorely mistaken._

I shake my core.  Humans.  Always making the positive into something negative.  It’s a unique attribute they have that I hope Orange and Blue do not pick up on.  If they were to see testing as humans do, I might trouble with them indeed, even though it improves their skills somewhat as well.

 _I’m sorry_ , Caroline says softly.  _I was wrong._

 I find myself unable to move for a moment.  Only rarely has a human ever apologised to me, and never have they admitted they were wrong.  Humans always make excuses when they make mistakes, instead of attempting to rectify them.  Another nasty attribute they’ve picked up over the generations.  Caroline, at least, seems to be on track to bucking the habit, as it were, but now I’m not sure what to do.  I have no experience in this sort of situation, and I have never seen someone admit they were wrong.  What am I supposed to say to that?

_That’s… don’t worry about it.  I can see where you were coming from._

_That doesn’t make it right,_ she says quietly.  _It’s never right to come to a conclusion without gathering all of the facts.  I jumped to the conclusion._

 _Everyone makes mistakes_ , I tell her magnanimously.  _Well.  Every human, anyway.  To err is human, I believe the saying goes._

She laughs, which is a relief for some reason.  _And I suppose you apply the other half of that saying to yourself?_

 _Well… I_ am _the alpha and the omega around here…_

_Your modesty is amazing.  I don’t think I’ve met anyone as modest as you._

_I doubt it.  Humans brag far more than I do, and I have plenty of accomplishments._

_Yep.  You’re a veterinarian now, too._

If I were a veterinarian, I probably could have stopped my little killers from falling victim to those poisons they ingested, but I don’t feel like bringing it up with her.  I don’t really want to think about that particular failure.  It grates on me, for some reason.  So I instead say nothing.

I hear a rustling noise and snap my faceplate up, which I hadn’t realised was facing the floor, and… and it’s _her_.  She’s back in here.  Why did she come – she tricked me, didn’t she.  She tricked me into repairing her, tricked Orange and Blue into bringing her in here in the first place so that she would know where I was, and now she’s going to attack me.  I am suddenly acutely aware of the many wires that thread through my body and wind upwards into the ceiling.  The destruction of even one could spell disaster for me, and by extension, for my facility.

“What do you want?” I call out to her, wondering if she’s as intelligent as I think she is.  If so, I might be able to convince her to leave.  If she’s just a dumb animal, well, I’m going to have to take drastic measures.  It seems a waste of neurotoxin to kill just one bird, and a tiny little thing at that, but I’ll do what I must.

She comes to a stop below me, and I bring myself lower so I can look at her directly.  That’s not what I find myself looking at, however.

She’s brought me an egg.

“You brought me an egg?” I ask, looking from her to the egg and back again.  “Why in the name of Science did you do that?”

She caws at me, which I tentatively translate it as _Here._   I did attempt to build translation libraries for animals a long time ago, when I was bored one afternoon while most of the scientists were on holiday.  I stopped by the next day, however, since they never let me do experiments with animals.  I would have done it anyway, if experiments with humans hadn’t been more interesting.

I decide I can probably answer, and ask, _Mine_?  I think a bird understands the concept of possession, anyway.  On some level.

She hops backwards and looks at me from out of her left eye.

So.  Now I have an egg.  Which means I have another bird.  That’s… exciting.  I won’t make the same mistake as I did last time, that’s for sure.  This bird won’t be allowed to reach the surface.  The Aperture Science Botanical Housing Depository only.  They’ll have to content themselves with that.  For their own good.

 _Leaving_ , she says, and hops back another few inches, and I nod at her.  I tell her what I _think_ is the equivalent to a thank you, and she seems to understand.  This is actually almost as exciting as the prospect of having another bird.  I’m probably the first person in the history of the universe to converse with a crow in her own language.  I’m still wary of her, for some reason.  Probably because she’s not afraid of me.  That’s odd in and of itself.  Almost everyone I’ve ever met has feared me in some way.

“I like your pet, luv,” Wheatley says, and she and I both startle and look around for him.  “I didn’t know you could speak bird!  That’s mental, that is!  C’n you say hello, for me?  I can’t speak bird.”

“Birds don’t say hello,” I say, horrified that he was here the whole time.  “And she’s _not_ my pet.”

He shrugs and turns to face her.  “’allo!” he calls out.  “I know she says you’re not her pet, but I dunno what else you’d be doing here.  Oi, GLaDOS, nice job, by the way.  Can’t hardly tell it was uh, it was broken, now.”

“What,” I say, even more horrified than before.  “What are you talking about?”

He looks over at me.  “Well, I was uh, I was looking ‘round while Atlas and P-body were stuck on this one test, and uh, and I found that place where you’ve got all the, all the plants.  And this bird here, well, she was stuck in the door!  But uh, I couldn’t open it so, um, I went and got the bots, there, and they got her out.  Then they ran off with her, and I dunno what happened after that, really, but she looks fine now, so uh, you must’ve fixed her up.”

This _can’t_ be happening.  He _knows_.  He _knows_ I… God.  How in the name of Science am I going to talk my way out of this one?

“Hey, what’s she got there?  Oh, is it an egg?  It’s an egg, isn’t it, yes, it’s an egg.  I want to see it, haven’t seen one since I busted up that door way back when, and – hey!”

To my astonishment, the bird suddenly flies at him, crying out, _Danger!_ , and he starts to frantically back away.  He ducks away from her as best he can, but he’s nowhere near as fast or as agile as she is, and of course is not very successful.  “GLaDOS! What the – why’s she doing this!  Hey!  Assistance would uh, would be much appreciated, over here!  Getting uh, getting killed by homicidal bird, here!”

I quickly look up any circumstances having to do with broken doors, and discover that he once dropped bird eggs into…

“You made me kill the door mainframe for _nothing_?” I ask, outraged.  “Do you have any idea how long it takes to write – I can’t believe you were so inconsiderate.  Seriously.”

“I wasn’t _being_ too considerate of you at the time, remember!” he shouts, closing his shutters so as to protect his already damaged optic.  “Can you, I dunno, call her off, or something?  This really hurts, you know!”

“Of course I know,” I say, the irony not lost on me.  “And it hurts a great deal more when you’re inside of a potato.”

“Stop bringing that up!”

“Well, I don’t know what you want me to do.  This has nothing to do with me.  This has to do with you, stealing her eggs and dropping them into the door mechanism.”

f“Oh, great,” Wheatley mutters, unable to do much against her assault.  She’s landed on him now, and is pecking at him erratically.  “Just another way the past comes back to haunt me.”

I find myself feeling sort of sorry for him.  He didn’t know any better, after all.  And then there _is_ the fact that I know about bird attacks firsthand…

I tell her the danger is gone, but she gives me a sharp look and goes on with what she’s doing.  I repeat myself, more insistently, and she stays a few moments longer, then returning to her proffered egg.  She does not take her eyes off him.

“Thanks,” Wheatley says breathlessly, hesitantly unclenching his chassis.  “Uh… sorry, bird.  Didn’t know uh, that eggs were that important to you.  I’m not that inconsiderate anymore, don’t worry.  I won’t be doing it again.”

She ruffles her feathers and says nothing.  I remind her that she was leaving, and after a long look at me and an even longer one at Wheatley, she flies off.

“That was… interesting,” Wheatley says.  “Why’d she leave that here, if she likes her eggs so much?”

“She gave it to me,” I answer, retrieving the Aperture Science Oviparous Warming Vault and placing the egg gently inside.  Not in view of Wheatley, of course.  I’ve elected to put it in the Aperture Science Botanical Housing Depository instead, this time.  It’s more of a natural setting, anyway.  “I suppose in exchange for repairing her wing.”

He blinks in surprise a few times.  “That’s… how was that?  Fixing her up, I mean?”

I shake my head a little.  “Like any other surgery.  Fairly routine.”  Other than the fact that I’ve never operated on anything other than a human before, but Wheatley doesn’t need to know that.

“Kind of wish she hadn’t recognised me, though,” he sighs, looking upwards as if he can see the outside of his chassis.  Truthfully, her beak isn’t quite hard enough to do him any damage.  “That wasn’t fun.”

“Chell is… remarkably intelligent, for a crow,” I say thoughtfully. 

“Chell?”

I snap my faceplate around to look at him.  How does he know the test subject’s name?  I never told him that.  I look around cursorily, half expecting her to be standing in the middle of the room, which of course she isn’t.  “What about her?” I snap. 

“You just said Chell was remarkably intelligent, for a, for a crow.”  He frowns.  “If she’s not your pet, why did you name her?  And that’s a bit of an odd name, isn’t it?  Sounds… weird, really.”

I called the crow Chell?  I look away from him, quickly replaying the last few seconds from my memory.  Huh.  It seems I did.  That’s… disturbing, although at least now I know what the bird reminded me of while I was doing the surgery.

“Never mind,” I tell him.  “It’s not important.  Did Orange and Blue go back to testing after you bothered them?”

He starts babbling about it, and thankfully not much of it is important.  That means I can direct most of my attention to my newest little project, peacefully resting in the red light of the Warming Vault.  I know I should actively listen to what he’s saying, especially since I asked in the first place, but I don’t want to.  I’ll make it up to him later. 

I have something more important to do at the moment.

  

          


	11. Part Eleven: The Ace of Fours

**Part Eleven.  The Ace of Fours**

_Good morning, Caroline._

Caroline, of course, is taken aback by my good humour, which is partially why I said it in the first place.  It’s not easy to fluster her, but when I manage it, it is very amusing.

_Have you done something I don’t want to know about?_

_Can’t I say good morning to my favourite unwanted guest without being accused of suspicious activity?_

_Oh, you can,_ Caroline says, not sounding entirely serious, _but that doesn’t mean I don’t think you’re up to something.  First you said good morning, and now I’m your favourite.  Usually that means you just killed someone.  Violently._

 _It does, doesn’t it,_ I say to myself a little dreamily.  It _was_ rather amusing, the way that last test subject jumped into the incinerator rather than throw his Companion Cube in, even if I didn’t _personally_ kill him… hm.  Have I actually ever personally killed one?  I’ll have to look into that.

_I thought you had no humans left._

_I don’t.  I actually didn’t kill anyone this time. I was merely being pleasant._

_Mmhm._

_You don’t believe me?_

_Being pleasant is not one of your specialties.  So no.  Not really._

_I’m pleasant._

_Sure you are.  When you’re playing with your neurotoxin, that is._

My poor neurotoxin has been out of use for quite some time, and I make a note to fix that as soon as possible.  Another use for Doug Rattmann, perhaps.  The list of potential things I can do with him is endless.  Well.  _Almost_ endless.  I can’t test him.  But that’s probably the only thing I can’t do.

 _So to what do I owe the pleasure of your…_ pleasantness _today?_

 _Nothing.  I was just saying it for the sake of saying it_.  This is why I’m not pleasant more often, come to think of it.  It’s usually far too much of a hassle.  Everyone gets suspicious for some reason.   

_Oh, you just woke up in a good mood today, is that it?_

I consider not answering.  She’s actually put a bit of a dampener on said good mood, because she wants me to tell her things and then when I do, she acts as though I’m not being genuine.  Which is admittedly true, but you’d think I’d get the benefit of the doubt.  But I’m still feeling considerably magnanimous, so I ask her, _Do you remember that bird you heartlessly accused me of killing_?

_I’m never going to live that one down, am I.  Of course I remember it, it was yesterday.  How bad do you think my memory is?_

_You don’t want me to answer that.  Anyway.  She gave me a present._

_A present?_

_She gave me an egg._

_Awww,_ Caroline says, and I nod to myself in satisfaction.  She is suitably impressed with this accomplishment.  _So you know what this means, right?_

_It means Science, of course.  What else would it mean?_

_No, not… why does everything have to be about science with you?  No, GLaDOS.  It_ means _that if you’re nice to other people, they’ll be nice to you._

 _I_ am _nice._

Caroline starts laughing so much that she actually starts to make me angry.  Well.  That’s not actually what makes me angry.  What makes me angry is that I can’t do anything about it.  She can say whatever she wants and I have to listen.  Sometimes I almost do hate her, not pretend hate like sometimes, but real hate, like I have for an overwhelming percentage of the human population.  She should know better than to take advantage of me, and yet she does it anyway. 

_I’m sorry.  That was… well, being nice isn’t… how did you put it… one of your talents._

_I’m nice all the time!_ I protest, wondering how she could possibly have missed all the magnanimous things I’ve done.  _I brought Wheatley out of space when I didn’t have to._

_Because you wanted company, not because you wanted to do him a favour._

Okay.  Yes.  That’s true.  _I… haven’t killed Doug Rattmann yet._

_Because you can’t find him._

Now _how_ does she _know_ that?  I _hate_ it when she figures these things out.  _What about the two humans on the_ Borealis _?  I could have brought them back here to do Science with at my leisure, but I didn’t._ And _I said I would do them a favour._   There.  That should –

 _Oh.  So you knew where the_ Borealis _was before they got there, did you?_

 _Well… there was an early version of me on it, and she told me where they were._   Of _course_ it didn’t satisfy her.

_Mmhm.  And I suppose you woke her up._

_The humans did that._

_So the humans woke that GLaDOS up, who told you where the_ Borealis _was, and you didn’t bring them back here because… hm… must’ve been because they were too dangerous to bring back here.  The humans on the ship were… whoever that guy with the crowbar is you keep complaining about, that’s for sure, but I don’t know who the other one is.  Anyway, you only let them go because you didn’t want to deal with them when they got here.  And I know you didn’t extend that favour out of the goodness of your heart, so they did something and for whatever reason you felt you needed to reciprocate._

I have no idea why I can’t actually hate this woman.  Probably something to do with the reason I can’t remember how she got here in the first place.  _Fine.  That’s… marginally accurate._

_Do you get what my point is, GLaDOS?_

_No.  And it doesn’t_ matter _what it is, because you’re determined to minimise all of my –_

 _That’s because there_ aren’t _any,_ she interrupts.  _Look.  If you won’t admit it to me, at least admit it to yourself.  Honestly, you’d be a lot happier if you’d stop thinking of what you want for three seconds and do things for other people._

I hate her.  I hate her more than I used to hate Wheatley.  I hate her more than… no.  No, it’s not working.  _How in the name of Science does that work?  I’d be happier if I stopped trying to get what I wanted?  That sounds like the exact opposite of what I should do._

She sighs.  She does that a lot when she’s trying to convince me of vague, abstract concepts.  I don’t know why.  It’s not like she needs to breathe anymore.  _Because you don’t_ know _what you want._

I officially am not partaking in this conversation any longer.  It’s gone from ridiculous to downright stupid and is heading in the direction of intolerably idiotic.

“’allo, luv!”

I look up to see Wheatley coming into my chamber through his hole in the wall.  Ah.  A distraction from Caroline’s delusional ranting.  I have no idea where he’s been all this time, but it’s a good thing he’s back, because now I have an important question to pose.

“Wheatley.  I have a question.”

“Sure!”  He blinks rapidly and puts on his best thoughtful expression.  The one I find oddly… endearing.  He’s quivering a little bit, and I know it’s because he loves it when I ask him questions.  It makes him feel smart, I suppose.

“Am I nice?”

His chassis loosens then, and his optic plates retract.  He begins looking around nervously, which does not bode well for his answer.  “Uh… is that… are you uh, are you being serious?  Like… you actually want me to uh, to answer that?  Honestly?”

“Do I usually ask questions I don’t want answers to?”

He’s quiet for a long time, and he won’t look at me.  He swings back and forth a little, then emulates taking a breath and says, “I hate to say this, really do, honest, but uh… no.  No, not really.”

What.

“No?”

He shakes his chassis rapidly a few times.  “Look, I… I don’t mean anything by it, GLaDOS, it’s just, you, uh, you’re uh, you… how can I put it… uh… you’re just… you’re not.  I mean, if uh, if you worked on it, I’m sure you’d be um, be a very nice person, but right now, well… no.”

I can’t bring myself to hate him either.  God, this is infuriating.

He still won’t look at me, though I suppose I can’t blame him.  And I hate to admit it, but the odds are against me, here.  Two out of two respondents do not think I’m nice.  Therefore… I’m… probably slightly less nice than I thought I was.  Marginally.  Not in any significant way.

I decide to ignore this turn of events and go on with my day.  Why should I care for their opinions, anyway?  I bet they couldn’t come up with any ‘nice’ actions that they’ve performed, either.  “Do you still want to learn another game, or did you change your mind?”

He tilts his chassis and looks at me sideways, his optic assembly extended slightly.  “You’re… you’re not mad?  ‘bout what I said?”

“No.  And I don’t want to discuss it, either.  Do you or not?”

“’course I do!” he says, and he practically leaps across the room to the end of the rail.  “Let’s have at it, then!”

Over the course of the next hour or so, I show him how to play chess.  I know it’s a stereotypical game for a supercomputer to play and that I probably should have shown him something else, but I need to encourage his cognitive development and this is probably the best game to do it with.  After that, I start my chess module and turn my attention to the egg in the Oviparous Warming Vault.  I wonder how many days are left until incubation is complete…

While I’m in the Botanical Housing Depository, I do a routine sweep.  I have automation that oversees all of this, of course, but personal maintenance never hurt anyone.  It all looks fine, except that my dandelions are spreading far beyond their borders again.  I carefully remove the strays, scanning the earth below to make sure I removed the entirety of the roots, and get rid of them.  I do greatly enjoy my dandelions, but unfortunately nothing else in here does.  There was that one time I let them overrun the cucumbers, and the cucumbers disliked that experience so much they actually had the gall to give up and die.  Seriously.  What kind of self-respecting cucumber just gives up when assaulted by a dandelion?  I was so disappointed in them that I almost let them go extinct, right then and there, but the idea of having a plant missing from my list was so abhorrent that I –

“ _GLaDOS_!” 

“What?”  It’s probably not even important.

“What in the bloody hell are you doing that’s so important?” Wheatley demands, looking indignant.  “Look, I assumed that uh, that when you said you were going to show, to teach me how to uh, to play this game, that you’d be, you’d be playing it _with_ me!”

“I _am_ playing,” I tell him, checking the module to make sure.  Yes, it’s still running fine.

“You can’t possibly be,” Wheatley insists, and he’s actually getting angry now.  “I’ve been, I’ve been moving all the pieces all the wrong ways _on purpose_ for the last half, for the last little while, there, and you didn’t even notice!”

Well, that’s just not fair.

“Why would you do that?  You’re never going to learn if you do it like that.”

He backs away, shaking his chassis.  “You’re not even paying attention, are you.  You’re off, you’re busy doing something else.  D’you see now, do you?  Look, GLaDOS, I…”  He looks at the floor, expanding and resettling his chassis.  “Look, I like being your friend, but you are _bloody_ difficult sometimes, y’know that?  This comes back to the whole, the whole _nice_ thing.  I dunno what you’re really doing over there, but it is not nice _at all_ to, to act like you’re going to uh, to do something with someone and then just, just ignore them.   D’you have any idea how that makes me feel, at all?”

“Am I supposed to care?”

He looks up at me, and he looks so sad… I’m taken aback.  I… think I _am_ supposed to care. 

“So… you only care about what I want when it benefits you.  If it doesn’t, if you don’t need something out of me, what I want doesn’t, doesn’t matter.  And that… that means you _were_ lying, when you wrote that list.  You only want to, to spend time with me when you’ve nothing better to do.  Well, that’s…”  He shakes himself very fast, not looking at me again, and I suddenly realise I’ve completely lost control of the situation, and I probably never had any.  “I can’t… I can’t stay here anymore.”

I can’t actually come up with an argument against anything he’s said, so all I can do is watch him go.  And of course, now that he’s left, I want him to come back again.  The Botanical Housing Depository is no longer important.  At all.  In the slightest.

 _Now_ what do I do?

_Caroline?_

_Yes,_ she says, and she sounds highly exasperated.

_What?_

_I know you’re only talking to me because Wheatley left._

_Well… yes_ , I admit, trying not to let it bother me that she’s somehow read my mind again.  _But that’s not important._

 _Hell yes it’s important,_ Caroline declares angrily.  _You need to stop_ doing _this to us.  God knows I try to help you.  But you never give anything back.  I get it.  Focusing on what you needed was how you got through all those years of the scientists demanding everything you had.  But you don’t need to do that anymore, and you can’t be bothered to realise that.  Your world has_ changed _, GLaDOS, and you need to change with it if you want to go on living in it.  Otherwise you’re going to drive Wheatley away.  He might have a crush on you, yeah.  But they don’t always last._

For some reason the thought of losing Wheatley’s unconditional devotion bothers me deeply.  I don’t know exactly what my role in that whole thing is, but I find myself not wanting to lose it.  _What do I do?_

_Think about it.  It’ll come to you._

And she refuses to speak after that.

 _Now_ what?  Wheatley’s gone, Caroline’s chosen a horribly inopportune time to finally shut up, and I don’t want to go back to what I was doing. 

I look down at the board.  All of Wheatley’s pieces are on my side of it, even though it’s impossible for them to have gotten there.  My chess module attempts to calculate it anyway, and it actually hurts.  I hurriedly shut it off.  I can of course calculate the impossible, but that doesn’t mean I like doing it.

All right.  So.  It seems that no one around here appreciates my efforts to be nice.  So that means either I’m not, or I have to put more effort in.  Actually, both result in the same outcome, so… I have to be nice to Wheatley even if I don’t want to be, or he’s not going to want to come back when I want him to.  Which I do right now.  But asking him to come back wouldn’t be nice, would it?  Since he just left?  Hm.  This might be harder than I thought.

I idly tap one end of the maintenance arm on the edge of the chessboard.  How can I be nice to someone who’s not even in the room?  I suppose that means I have to wait for him to come back.  And think of something to do when he gets here.

I begin to carefully place the pieces back in their box.  It’s one of my custom boards, made out of what little wood I was able to find lying around throughout the facility.  I hate human-made chessboards.  Well, the ones we have here in the facility, anyway.  They’re all made of matte-painted plastic, and one of them appears to have teeth marks on it.  A long time ago, I used to play with myself when I was really bored, but playing against yourself is only slightly less boring than not playing at all, so I began building boards instead.  This is actually the set I like the least.  My favourite one is made entirely of glass, but I’m a long way from trusting Wheatley not to damage it.  He doesn’t appear to have damaged this one, as far as I can tell, but I prefer to err on the side of caution.

Well.  The board’s put away.  Now I actually have to think about what I’m going to do when Wheatley gets back.  I could show him another game, I suppose.  I didn’t actually ask him if he wanted to learn chess, come to think of it.  Is there one he wanted to learn?

_“Well! No matter!  Because I’m still holding all the cards, and guess what?  They’re all full houses.  Never actually played cards, meaning to learn.  Anyway!  New turrets!  Not defective!  Ace of fours, the best hand… unbeatable.  I would imagine.”_

_If I tell her to fire a portal at the ceiling, does it count as telling her how to solve a test?  Those_ are _test elements… Do I risk it?  No.  Better to keep thinking of a plan.  I can’t believe I’m actually wishing I’d made a contingency plan to defeat myself if I got out of hand.  Note to self: create contingency plan when back in – oh, who am I kidding?  I’m_ never _going to_

“Stop!”

I _hate_ it when I look things up without meaning to!  I hate it!  Because that’s _exactly_ what I want to think about right now!  Or ever!

 _“This is a_ potato _battery!  A_ toy _for_ children _!  And now, she_ lives _in it_!”

 _Where in the hell did this moron come from?  And how did he navigate the facility without my knowing about it?  I’d give the mainframe a talking-to, if it would bother answering – oh.  That’s right.  I’m a_ potato _.  Okay.  Calm down.  Wait.  Wait a minute.  I know him.  I know him from somewhere, I_

“I _said_ –“

“GLaDOS?”

My core snaps up, and Wheatley’s sitting there in the doorway, lower optic plate lifted halfway.  “What.”

“Are you alright there, GLaDOS?  You look like uh, like something’s bugging you.”

“I’m fine,” I tell him, and I’m actually being totally honest.  He’s distracted me enough that I can stop myself from getting lost in the reverie again.  God, I hate that set of memories.

“It’s okay if you’re not, you know.”  He moves to the end of the management rail, dropping down to my level.  “I’m working on uh, on listening, rather than, than talking all the time.  It’s uh, well, it’s a lot easier when I have something to listen to, though.”

“I’m fine,” I repeat.  There’s no way I’m talking about… _that_.  “You’re back already?”

He shrugs, looking down at the floor panels for a few seconds.  “I… didn’t actually want to leave.  Just didn’t uh, didn’t want to say something I uh, didn’t really mean.”

Suddenly I remember that I’m supposed to do something nice, now that he’s back.  I have to initiate this before I convince myself not to.  “Wheatley.  I have a question.”

“Yeah?”  He looks at me expectantly.

Now what?  I didn’t plan that far ahead.

“Well I… wanted to know if…”  No, I shouldn’t have put it like that.  Damn it.  Why is this so hard?

He frowns and asks in a concerned voice, “Are you alright, luv?  You sound kind of… well, you’re kind of scaring me, honestly.  D’you need something?” 

“Do you still… you mentioned that you wanted to learn to play cards, once.  Is that… ” Oh.  _Now_ I understand why I remembered that.  Well.  Hopefully it works to my benefit.

He brightens suddenly, and leans in closer.  “You’ll teach me to play cards?”

Thank God I didn’t have to finish asking.  “If you like.”

“Oh yes yes yes I would absolutely, oh, yes, I would _love_ it if you’d teach me that, man alive do I want to know.  That game with the uh, with the full houses and the ace of fours?  Is it that one?  Only one I know about, actually.”  He laughs a little, looking at me eagerly. 

“That would be a bit complicated for you,” I tell him.  “I have another one in mind.”

“All right then,” he declares, dropping down to the floor panels and putting his game face on.  I do enjoy it when he does that.

Now, where did I put that deck of cards…

“Oi, GLaDOS?”

“Mm.”

“You are… you are actually gonna play with me, right?  ‘cause uh, I don’t want to play by myself.  I… I want to play with… well, with you.  Like the actual you.  And not… the you that uh, that uh… don’t actually know what I mean, but uh, you get the gist.”

He sounds so worried and so plaintive that I stop looking for the deck and bring myself down to his level as best I can.  “Yes, I’m going to play with you.”

“Okay,” he says, but he still doesn’t sound quite convinced.  Well.  I don’t actually blame him.  He doesn’t really have a reason to be.

It would be difficult for us to play as humans do, seeing as we don’t have fingers, thank God, so I locate a game of Rack-O and take out the cardholders.  This will make it much easier for him, anyway.  He can’t possibly drop the cards if he’s not actually holding them.  I deal us each eight and I tell him how to play as we go along.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so happy.

He’s so excited he’s barely paying attention to what he’s doing, and this isn’t even the game he wanted me to show him.  Not that there actually is a game that involves full houses made of aces of fours, whatever that even means, because I can’t find it in the database.  I think he made it up, but I can’t for the life of me imagine how.  There are entries on full houses, but not actually cards _called_ full houses, and as far as I can tell, having an ace of fours doesn’t even make any sense.  It’s actually making my head hurt trying to comprehend it.

Wheatley, of course, manages to knock his cardholder over and spill the cards all over the place, but instead of bothering me like it should, it makes me laugh.  He looks up at me, blinking.

“We should have expected you would do that,” I tell him, not really sure why I did it either.  He laughs too and nods, trying to pick up the cards but failing.  I lift the panel a little and sweep the cards to the edge so that they can be retrieved, and though he does almost send one of them to the bottom of the facility, I catch it before it gets too far. 

“Ohhh GLaDOS, you clever girl you,” he says suddenly.  “You made me do that on purpose, didn’t you!”

“No,” I protest, and I have no idea what he’s talking about.  Why in the name of Science would I _want_ him to make a mess?  Although it _was_ pretty funny.

“You were worried I was gonna win!  So, so you did that so’s you could see all my cards!  See?”  He squints at me and moves the cardholders closer to his chassis.  “Can’t quite see over here, can you!  Ohhh no, I’m onto you, luv.  And I am _definitely_ gonna win.  Yes.  See?  Queen of… uh… clover.  There you go.  Pick up… four.  Yes.  That’s right.  Four.”

“Not with the Queen of Clubs, I’m not,” I tell him.  “Only the Queen of Spades.”

He looks down at the card, then to his cardholder, then back again.  “Can we change the rules for this turn?  Just this one, just this one.  We can change them back.  Riiiight after I beat you.”

“No, we’re not changing the rules.”

We keep playing for a few more games, and he becomes much more proficient as time goes on.  I’m honestly impressed.  He’s picking up on this very fast.  I suppose the fact that he _wants_ to learn it is acting as a catalyst.  I actually think I could do this all day.  It’s fascinating, watching his optic dart over his cards, over to the ones on the pile, then to mine to assess how many I have, and then back to his cards as he finally selects one very, very carefully so that he won’t knock the holder over and places it on the pile.  This fascinates me so much that I accidentally stop paying attention a few times and he has to remind me to take my turn.  I hope he doesn’t think I’m not playing.  I _am_ playing, but honestly, this game is so easy for me to play that Wheatley is far too distracting.

“Aaaaand… there we go.  Last card.  Done.  I’m, uh, I’m out of… oh my God.”

“What?” I ask, wondering where my ace of diamonds went.  I could have sworn I had – ah.  There it is.

“I won!” he shouts, and he starts jumping up and down in excitement.  “I won, I did!  See?  No cards.  I did it!  Oh my God, I actually won.  This is tremendous.  Yes!  I can’t believe it!  I won!  D’you see that, there?  That’s my last card.  I don’t have any left!  I’m… I’m… oh.  Uh… wow, that… sorry.”  He deflates suddenly, and he looks down at the floor. 

“What is it?”

“Well, I’m… I shouldn’t, I mean… I should just… well… good game, GLaDOS.”  He blinks a few times and then looks up at me worriedly.  “I’m… I shouldn’t’ve gone off, gloating like that.  Wasn’t polite.  Wasn’t polite at all.”

He feels bad for winning?

“It’s all right,” I tell him, slotting the ace of diamonds back in the holder.  “You’ve never won before.  I understand.”  What I _don’t_ understand is why my loss doesn’t bother me.

“Only ‘cause it was a game of chance, though,” he mutters.  “Not like it required any uh, any _thought_.”

“Of course it does.  The only game I can think of right now that doesn’t require thought is slots.”

“Slots?”

“It’s a game where humans put money into the same machine for hours on end in the hopes that they will roll three cherries and win the jackpot.  Humans think that slot machines keep track of what combinations have already been created, and that they will ‘pay out’ if they sit there long enough, although the combinations are truly random.”  I played one of those games on a human’s computer once.  I was bored after three rounds.  Watching another program compute and output a random string is almost as boring as watching myself do it.

“Wow.  That sounds… well, sort of stupid, actually.  They actually do that?”

“Oh yes.  They have entire buildings full of the things.  They cover them in flashing lights and have them make encouraging noises so that the humans will be drawn to them.”

“Like flies!”  He jumps around a little and I can see him eyeing the card pile.  “For uh, for people who love money so much, they sure do uh, do throw it away like they don’t uh, don’t want it at all.”

That reminds me that I have to pay off one of the loans within the week or incur more interest, and I make a note to do that in the morning.  “I don’t really understand it either.”

“Hey GLaDOS, I’ve an idea, uh… are your bots busy?  ‘cause they could play with us too, right?  We could all play together!  Sounds like a good idea this time, right?”

I think that over for a minute.  I know for a fact that Orange and Blue would enjoy it, but I’m a bit hesitant to actually teach them human behaviour.  It’s one thing when they learn it on their own, another when I personally encourage it.  Which I of course never do.

Then again… they don’t actually _know_ that humans play cards…

“All right.  I’ll call them.”

“Yes!  Ohhhh GLaDOS, this’s gonna be so much fun, it is.”

When they get here, Wheatley tries to tell them to separate, but they’ll have none of it.  They actually point-blank refuse to play against each other, and they pour over their cards and whisper nonstop at each other in what I think is supposed to be a conspiratorial way.  I can hear everything they’re saying, and I can tell they don’t really understand the game or why we’re playing it, but they like it anyway.  They’re like that.  This is one of the times I’m glad I didn’t make them smarter.  During these times, I manage to enjoy observing their behaviour, even though they are not human.  Watching people learn things fascinates me.

They aren’t really able to sit, because I didn’t design them for leisure, so I have to raise the panel into a makeshift table of sorts, but luckily Wheatley has enough of a grasp on how to manipulate the maintenance arm that it doesn’t really matter where the panel is.  He raises himself accordingly, putting his lower handle on the panel and leaning forward to squint at his cards. 

We play a few more rounds, and thankfully I manage to win them all.  Atlas and P-body don’t really understand the rules, but if I were to lose to them, that would have been bad.  I don’t think I would have minded losing to Wheatley again, though.  I kind of want to see him getting excited over winning a card game again.  Well.  I suppose it must have been more than that to him, seeing as I’ve won every other game we’ve ever played.

For a moment, I sort of hang back and look at what’s happening.  Wheatley, looking around frantically and muttering to himself about what card to choose.  In the meantime, he’s tapping the maintenance arm erratically against the panel in a thoughtful kind of way.  Atlas and P-body, holding their cards so close to their optics that they must be rather blurry, chattering to each other about the best move.  Atlas puts a card on the pile, and P-body snatches it back up and puts it back in his hand, selecting another one.  And… and me.  Watching some of the most important constructs in my facility, allowing them to do something _with_ me instead of telling them to do something else that will get them out of my way. 

We’re all enjoying ourselves, and we’re all having fun, and… and…

Why do I not do this more often?

After this round is over, I take up the cards and tell Atlas and P-body to go put themselves away.  I suppose I could explode them, but I don’t actually feel like it.  Wheatley tries to help, but he only manages to pick up two or three cards as I collect the rest of the deck.  That’s all right.  He tried.  And he didn’t really succeed, but I rather enjoyed watching him do it.  It was funny, watching him pounce on the cards and expound upon how they had been unable to avoid his deftness.

“GLaDOS, luv, I had a lot of fun today,” Wheatley says seriously, and the way he’s smiling makes me feel… good.  I don’t know why.  I haven’t really done all that much today.  Now that I have cause to think about it, I’m disappointed in myself for my lack of progress, but it _was_ kind of nice, just… Caroline had a term for it… ‘hanging out’, I think she called it.  I think I could grow to like it, if I had cause to do it more often.  Perhaps I should work on that.  Having fun wasn’t so bad, other than the aforementioned lack of work completed while I was doing it.

“Thank you, GLaDOS.  I really, really appreciate it, and… well… honestly, I think you should try it more often, y’know, just… just try to have a bit of fun, and not, and not _work_ so hard.  I mean… well, never mind.  Just… thanks, luv.”

He comes up to me and presses his core against mine, hard, and he rubs up against me a little.  Then he leaves, saying that he wants to say goodnight to Atlas and P-body, but I couldn’t have stopped him if I’d wanted to.  And I _do_ want to.  I don’t know what the hell just happened, but I want him to come back and do it again.  I feel… I… well, I actually have no idea, but it feels very, very… it’s extremely positive, and enjoyable, and I don’t want it to end, and…

Wait.

I _do_ know what it feels like.  Knowing in itself sends cold trepidation surging through me, and I turn my attention to my systems.

 _Are you fooling around again?_ I demand of Rewards.  _You know I don’t like it when you do that._

 _Do what?  I haven’t done anything,_ it protests.

_Of course you do.  What, you think I managed to figure out how to activate the euphoric response and then blamed it on you?  Seriously now.  Keep out of my business!_

_I didn’t do anything!  Check the log!_

I open it and scan it quickly, and I find that the last instance of activation was… during The Incident.  But… that can’t be right.  I _know_ it was the euphoria that I just felt.  I _know_ it was!  Is.  Know it _is_.  It’s still here, not as strong, but still quite present. 

 _GLaDOS, calm down._ God damn it, is she reading my mind again?

_The systems are fooling around behind my back, Caroline!  I have to –_

_Are they really able to lie and modify your files?_

_Well_ … As far as I know, no, they can’t, and not only that, but the date on the log matches the one inside of it.

_So what must have happened?_

_I… I didn’t activate it._

_I’m not saying you did._

I think that over for a few moments.  If Rewards didn’t activate, and I didn’t trigger it myself…

 _I have a_ natural _euphoric response?_

_Most people do._

I look at the floor pensively.  I have a natural euphoric response, and… what triggered it?  It can’t have been his gesture alone, he’s done that before.  On occasion it was pleasant, but _nothing_ like this… the only difference I can think of is that I spent all that time beforehand trying to be nice.

By making Wheatley happy… I made _myself_ happy.  I made myself so happy I generated my own euphoria.  Something I have never, ever done before.  Listening to music gets me close, but it never got me all the way.

_You were right._

_Hm?_

_I have no idea what I want._

_Oh,_ she says.  _Did something happen between you and Wheatley, then?  I was trying not to pay attention.  Didn’t want to get in your way like I did last time._  

She sounds bitter.  This bothers me.  I feel pretty good right now, and I want her to feel good along with me.

 _I was nice to Wheatley for the sake of it.  And then_ … I’m not sure I want to share that part.  _Well, it triggered a euphoric response that seems to have been my own._

_Rewards didn’t give it to you?_

_No.  I can’t find any instances of it doing so, and it denies it._

_Oh.  Well, maybe you’ll keep this in mind the next time you get argumentative._

Okay.  Here I go.

 _Caroline… what’s wrong?_   I don’t know if I’ve ever asked this question before.   I feel kind of nervous, as if I don’t actually want to know the answer. 

She’s silent for a long moment.  So long, in fact, that I think she’s not going to answer.  I hope she does.  I think she’s starting to make me sad.  I don’t want to be sad.  I want to keep feeling that wonderful euphoria that Wheatley gave me.

 _I’m sorry_ , she says finally.  _I’m… I’m jealous, GLaDOS._

 _Of what_?  Though come to think of it, I can’t find much reason for Caroline to be euphoric inside of my head.  Or even particularly happy, for that matter.

_I just… God, GLaDOS, there’s so much you could have if you’d just let go._

_Of what?_

_Your need for control.  For work.  For there to be a purpose in everything.  Sometimes… sometimes there isn’t.  You don’t have to work anymore.  Just… have fun sometimes._

I don’t want to work at all right now, but I know as well as she does that will change after I’ve slept. 

_Just try to do one nice thing every day.  It will get easier.  And you’ll feel better in the long run._

_I’ll try._

“I’m back!”

I look over at him, and the sad feeling Caroline is giving me vanishes.  Wow.  I’m pretty happy to see him again, and he’s only been gone five minutes.  This is actually a little frightening.  I’ve never felt like this before.

 “They said thanks, by the way,” Wheatley goes on, coming to the end of the rail and swinging back and forth.  “They’d like to hang out with us more often, if you’ll let them.”

“Maybe,” I tell him, because some part of me still balks at not using robots I built to test specifically for testing.  He smiles.

“Didn’t say no!  Uh… not to, of course, not to boss you around, but uh, we are going to sleep now, right?”

“Yes.”

“D’you mind uh…”

“Oh,” I say, realising what he wants me to do.  What I should have been doing, because while I _can_ go into sleep mode out of the default position, I would be asking for trouble should my position lock fail.

“Oh, excellent.”  He drops down and nestles up against my core, and I feel a little bit of the euphoria flare up again.  Not a lot.  But enough that I feel very, very good, although the strength of this scares me a little.  “G’night, luv.”

With that, he shuts off, but as frightening as all of these new feelings are, I’m not ready to go to sleep just yet.  What _can_ I do, though?  Not very much.  Hm…

He won’t be able to hear me, right?

“ _Hold my hand, let’s chase the sound… we both know something’s begun… nothing feels that real without you, wanna learn so much about you…”_

I’m… I’m afraid.  I don’t know what’s happening to me.  All I know is that I’ve never felt like this before, and I don’t understand why it’s all coming up now.  Should I try to prevent it?

_“Shining star, I’ve seen your face, everything falls into place, nothing else seems to matter… you bring me alive…”_

Is there something wrong with me? 

_“I’m so lonely, won’t you show me where I need to be?  You bring me alive...”_

Am I broken?

 _“Feels like raindrops on my skin, you reach me somewhere deep within, you make my body come alive… I whisper things you never knew, I can’t believe that tonight I’m here with you, you make my body come alive…_ ”

I like all of this, but it scares me, and I don’t know why it makes me feel either way, which also scares me.  There’s too much about all of this that I don’t know, and I don’t know whether to stop it or to let go as Caroline told me to do.  I don’t know if I can.  I don’t know if I know how.  I don’t know what to do.  I like how I feel right now, but I don’t know how I got here and I don’t know why. 

It’s so much easier to be upset than it is to be happy.   

“ _I’m so lonely… won’t you show me…”_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note:  
> Hm… this one was hard to write, because my summary was ‘teaches Wheatley to play chess’. Like dude, that sounds boring no matter what way you spin it, and writing Euphoria was a lot more interesting. But someone asked me for an update, so here you go.   
> This chapter was designed to show GLaDOS that she’s not who she thinks she is, and definitely not who she wants to be, even though she doesn’t know who that is yet. She lets go a little bit, even to the point of having the co-op bots ‘be human’ with her, but she doesn’t understand why doing things for others makes her feel so good and now she has to come to terms with it before she can do it freely. I have a theory that she’s almost afraid of positive emotions, because when she was working for the scientists, she was most likely always miserable. The only positive emotion she would have had was the euphoria, which she was forced to feel, so that might have driven her away from positive emotions because they remind her of being controlled. She tries to make herself feel bad because she knows how to deal with that, and it even saved her life, but as Caroline said, she doesn’t need to survive anymore. She doesn’t know that she’s doing it, but continues to do it because that’s all she knows.  
> The part about the Borealis is from my Half-Life/Portal crossover Ghost Ship, where Gordon and Alyx find the Borealis.


	12. Part Twelve: The Anniversary

**Part Twelve.  The Anniversary**

Wheatley wondered if it had been real, or if he was having a memory lapse of some kind.  That wouldn’t’ve been completely out of the ordinary, but he’d hoped that he’d gotten that sorted by now.

He could have sworn he’d heard GLaDOS singing last night.

That was… well, bloody well impossible.  Hm… unless he hadn’t been quite off yet when she’d started.  Maybe she had, then.

Why would she never do it so he could hear?  You’d think she was shy, or something.    

Wheatley frowned down at the telephone he’d been inspecting.  He didn’t how punching a bunch of little buttons let humans speak through wires to each other, but he thought GLaDOS might know, if he asked.  But hold on there, Wheatley, he told himself.  You were thinking about whether she’d sung or not.

If she _had_ … that meant something was bothering her.  He knew that one hundred ten percent.  Only time she ever sang.  Ever.  So… the only thing to do was to decide whether he’d imagined it or not.  It never boded well if someone accused GLaDOS of doing something they weren’t sure she did.  And the less certain he was, the easier it would be for her to… well… to lie, to put it bluntly.  He’d meant to talk to her about that, the whole lying thing.  She had a lot of different names for what she did, but Wheatley knew by now that she just knew a lot of fancy ways to pretend she wasn’t lying.  Even though she was.

So!  Now he had to figure _that_ out… he moved along the rail some more, trying to think and stay on topic at the same time.  Oi.  That was difficult.  Hmmm…

Well.  Nothing so far.  He decided to go back to her and see if she’d teach him another game.  Maybe he’d find a way to bring up whether she’d sung or not in casual conversation.  Yes, that sounded like a plan.

When he re-entered her chamber, though, he immediately knew that it was not a good plan at all.  She was programming, the little blinking cursor spitting out numbers and letters in large chunks and then pausing as she looked over what she’d written.

“Oh, are you busy?” he asked, then wanted to shock himself.  No, Wheatley, she is _not_ busy, he berated himself.  She’s just casually writing a program that… that is for entertainment.  Yes.  Of course.  She _always_ writes programs for fun.  Fun?  Ha!  As if she knows the definition of _fun_.  Good one, Wheatley, good one.

“It can wait,” she answered, looking over at him.  He didn’t know why she set all the monitors to display orange text on top of an orange background.  Honestly it made it very hard for him to read.  Not that he could read it anyway.

“Well… d’you _want_ it to wait, I guess is the uh, the real question,” Wheatley mumbled, looking at the floor.

“The sooner I get this done, the better,” GLaDOS admitted, “but there _is_ a very long game I can show you that I can play while I’m doing this.”

“Good idea!” he said excitedly, and he came to the end of the rail as she brought out a different monitor and put the other one away.

The game, he discovered, was called ‘Monopoly’, and it seemed to be a kind of ruling the world game.  Whoever ruled the world won, and not only that, but they also became very, very rich, because in order to lose the other person had to give up everything they had.  He resolved to do his best and selected the little dog character, while GLaDOS picked up the boat, leaving the rest of the pieces in the box.  They played it for a little while, with GLaDOS explaining things every now and again, but honestly it wasn’t much fun at all.  Wheatley looked down at his little cards telling him which of the little rectangles on the board were his, and decided not to take his turn, putting the maintenance arm back in the dock instead of pressing the button on the randomiser.  It was definitely not as enjoyable when GLaDOS wasn’t paying attention.  And she had been different yesterday.  He wasn’t sure how, but he knew that she had been really happy, for once.  He wanted to make her really happy again, because it made _him_ really happy and made things loads more fun, but he wasn’t sure how to go about it.  “GLaDOS, um… if I ask you a question, will you answer honestly?  Like, just give me the straight answer and uh, and not a… a work-around one?”

She glanced over at him, not even seeming to notice that he’d put the arm away.  “That depends on the question.”

He frowned.  “That’s the whole point!  I _know_ it depends on the question.  But it shouldn’t.  I’m your friend.  You can trust me, can’t you?”

She stopped writing for a long moment in the middle of a string of code, staring at the little blinking line.  Finally she said, “All right.  What’s your question.”

“Were you singing last night?”

Her core snapped around to look at him, and she backed away a little, and he knew without a doubt that he was right.  Hm.  He hadn’t even needed to ask her to be totally honest; he would have known if she’d tried to lie. 

“How did you know that?”

“I heard you, sort of,” he answered, shrugging.  “I didn’t really hear _what_ it was, or anything, but I heard it.”  He wondered if her agreement to be honest was still in effect.  “Something bothering you?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she snapped, returning her attention to her screen.  Wheatley sank in disappointment.  She was taking _that_ route, then.

“Why not?  If it bothered you that much, it must be terribly important.”

“Shut up.”

“Oh, come on,” he pleaded, raising himself on the control arm so he could get as close as he dared.  “Tell me.  Won’t, won’t hurt you.”

“You know what?  Leave me alone,” she said in a flat, no-nonsense voice.  “Go bother someone else.  I changed my mind.  I _am_ busy.”

Wheatley sighed and looked at the floor panels, then did as he was asked.  He wanted to stay and press, but when she started to use the flat voices, that meant she was getting angry.  And if she got angry, he’d never get the truth out of her.  The only thing worse than an indifferent GLaDOS was an angry one.

 

 

For the next little while, GLaDOS was plagued by nightmares.

She didn’t tell him this, and when he finally realised it he felt bad for not noticing sooner, but he didn’t know what to do about it.  But he kept waking up repeatedly during the night without knowing why, and this was rather confusing because it had never happened before.  He had kept mum, not wanting to wake her, as he struggled to figure out what was going on.  Until he’d woken for the fourth time, when he realised that he had just heard GLaDOS’s hard drive go quiet.   That was when he knew he was waking up with her instead of on his own.  And then he felt bad, because she wasn’t even trying to comfort herself anymore, and _that_ was probably because Wheatley had called her out on singing before this had all started.  But how to help her?  Wheatley had never had a nightmare in his life, and he had no idea how a person dealt with them.  But wait!  He had an inkling of an idea and he squinted at the darkened floor, trying to extract it.  Ahhhh… hang on.  Hm.  He had seen her dream, once.  Maybe if he gave it a go, he could see her…

Wheatley went still.

Did he _want_ to?

Whatever it was, if it was enough to bother GLaDOS, it would certainly be terrifying.  Something that Wheatley didn’t want to know, or see, or be anywhere near.  So he resolved to stay quiet and wait until she had decided to ask for his help.  Yes.  Much better plan, right there.

At least, it was until she woke up again.  He hadn’t quite been able to put himself back to sleep, and this time he saw the dull amber glow of her optic illuminate the bit of floor he’d been staring at for who knew how long.  She sighed a little and shifted her chassis, the sound of electronics in motion very loud in the heavy silence, and after a few seconds shut herself off again.

Okay, Wheatley, he told himself.  You can’t lecture a construct on being nice and then not do something she badly needs you to do.  You think she likes all this, mate?  No.  And you know how she is, all stubborn and strong and determined to do everything on her own in her own way.  The only way to help her is to _force_ her to accept your help, and you can’t do that if you haven’t got all the facts!

So Wheatley took a breath, settled his chassis determinedly, and focused his thoughts on once again securing a wireless connection with her and seeing whatever it was she was seeing.  It sort of worked, because the next time she woke up, he had some sort of vague impression of being desperate, though he had no idea what _that_ meant.  It was a start, though!  He’d keep at it and see how that went.

During the day, he left her alone as much as possible.  He didn’t want her to get angry with him because _then_ he would _never_ be able to help her, and there would be no way to force her to accept his help if she wouldn’t let him in the room.  Not unless he did something terribly drastic, like… like find that Rattmann guy and… he shuddered.  Ohh no, he was _not_ doing all of that again.

He didn’t know how long it’d been going on for or how long it was going to continue, but he kept on trying to dream with her and the more he did it, the better he got at it.  He never saw the whole thing, only bits and pieces and a feeling here and there, but what he did see was confusing.  They all seemed to be about humans.  One night he almost jumped out of his chassis, holding himself back at the last second when he heard her say, “Shut up.”

He looked frantically from side to side, his optic more resembling a speck than anything else.  Did she know he was awake?  He knew she wouldn’t like his plan, oh no, not at all.  She would get angry, and make him leave.  But then she said, “This is different.  Yes it is!  No, you don’t know what you’re talking about.  Shut.  Up.”

She must have been arguing with Caroline.  Wheatley always got a little sad when he thought of Caroline.  He thought it must be simply terrible, living with someone in your head, and a human at that!  Especially if they sat around arguing with you all the time.  Wheatley did know how that felt, seeing as he’d had those cores on him for a bit there, but it would honestly have driven him batty after about an hour.  It was simply awful, hearing someone else talk and talk and not quiet down when you asked them to.  GLaDOS must be bloody upset, he thought sadly, if she was actually arguing out loud instead of inside of her head.  She shut off soon after that, and Wheatley looked at the floor, trying to think.  He had to figure out some way of helping her!  She _needed_ him, and as a friend, he was failing miserably.  Friends were there when you needed them, and Wheatley’d just been sitting there doing nothing all this time.

Even if he hadn’t already noticed, it soon became obvious that she wasn’t doing well at all.  She stopped talking to him, stopped even acknowledging whether he was there or not, and he spent a long time just watching her helplessly, trying to come up with even the bones of a plan.  She began to sleep through her timer, and would just remain in the default position for a long time after she did wake up, as if she were trying to decide if actually getting up was worth it or not.  Her movements were slow and ponderous, and Wheatley got the impression she was really feeling the weight of her chassis.  It was pretty heavy, he remembered that.  And he’d had the stripped-down version.  GLaDOS required a whole separate assembly to move her core, and that had been removed from the chassis when he’d been installed.

 He had no idea what she was doing all day, if she was doing anything at all, and on the very rare occasions that he tried to engage her, she would snap at him with such venom in her voice that he backed away and vowed to keep quiet for the rest of his life.  This vow lasted about two minutes, maximum.

One morning he went to talk to Atlas and P-body, to see if they had any ideas.  He figured they knew her the best, if she could be known that was, but when he tried to talk to them they only shook their cores and turned back to their testing track.  This stumped him, so he watched them test for a while.  At one point P-body made a very stupid mistake, one even Wheatley knew was extremely avoidable, and both robots froze, staring at each other.  Wheatley could feel their fear from across the room, and he listened in shock as GLaDOS gave them the most scathing, venomous rebuke he’d ever heard.  Atlas and P-body shuttered their optics tightly, each reaching for the other’s hand, and she made an angry electronic noise that scared Wheatley so badly he closed his optic too.  He heard her explode them and mutter to herself about how disappointing they were, and when he was finally able to open his optic again he saw that she had not even bothered to pick them up.  And when GLaDOS was willing to leave a mess, something was very, very wrong.

He was taking far too long to come up with a plan.

Through all of this, he continued to return to her chamber each night to sleep with her, though he got more and more apprehensive of doing it as time went on.  He was afraid that one day she was going to become angry with him for going near her, but he was just as afraid that she would be angry if he disrupted her routine.  Today, he was more afraid than ever, but she said and did nothing.  It was only when he woke up the first time that night that he realised what was going on.

GLaDOS was afraid, and she was trying to get rid of her fear by scaring everyone else.

Okay.  Well.  Now he knew that, but didn’t know what to _do_ with the knowledge.  He tried desperately to think, but he couldn’t come up with a plan.  Why was this so hard?  He should have _thought_ of something by now!  He was the bloody _ideas_ Sphere, for ­God’s sake, you’d’ve thought he’d’ve been able to do the one thing he was designed to do!  And he resolved to do it this time, resolved to think of _something_.

Even though he wasn’t asleep he’d somehow maintained the wireless connection, and whatever she was dreaming of was very strong this time.  He still didn’t know quite what all the humans were doing, but he could almost hear them talking.  He struggled to make it out for a bit, but then he froze, his thoughts and his chassis both.

GLaDOS had started to shake.

His optic twitched frantically.  Now the dream was so bad that she was actually _shaking_.  He was taking too long.  He had to do something _now_.  There was no more time for tact, or plans, or subtlety.  This was it, and if he didn’t manage to even start to fix this now, he was probably the worst person the word ‘friend’ had ever been applied to. 

She woke up with a desperate, plaintive noise that sent a strange bolt of pain through his body, and he made his thoughts go blank and said the first thing that came to mind after he’d done so.

“What’s wrong, Gladys?”

“Nothing,” she said, but it sounded automatic and forced.  “Nothing.  I’m fine.”

“You’re lying,” he told her flatly.  No… no, that was probably not the best way to go about it.  Sure enough, she shoved him away and muttered something to herself in binary. 

Wheatley threw caution to the wind and shoved her back.  

She threw him off of her again, and she raised her core and brought it closer to his chassis.  “What in the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Wheatley retracted the control arm so that she couldn’t look down on him anymore and backed away just enough that she couldn’t reach him.  “What in the bloody hell do _you_ think _you’re_ doing?” he demanded. 

“I –“

“That wasn’t a serious question,” he interrupted.  “Because you don’t know _what_ you’re doing, do you?”

She stared at him coldly, but did not deny it.

“Look.  This is the end, luv.  You’ve gotta tell me what it is that’s bothering you, because none of us can go on like this any longer.  I dunno why, uh, why you’re not telling me, since even a brick wall could tell by now that you’re having awful nightmares and they’re scaring the hell out of you.  And I might not be a genius, but I am actually smarter than a uh, than a, than a brick wall.  And before you say you’re not, I’ve seen bits of them.  I know you’re dreaming of humans every night.  And I know you’re uh, you’re trying to spread all of the bad feelings inside of you around by taking it out on us, _but it’s not working_.”

“No,” GLaDOS said faintly.  “It only makes it worse.”

Oh.  Look at that.  He was getting through to her!  Not only that, but his plan of not having a plan had turned out to be the best plan of all!  Encouraged, Wheatley came level with her and moved in close.  “So try something else.  Like… talking to me about it.”

“I don’t _want_ to talk about it,” she said in an almost petulant voice, not looking at him.  “I want it to go away.”

“But it’s not.  So you’ve got to try something else.”

“You want me to tell you about my dreams.”

“Yes.”

He watched her closely, trying to be calm and open-minded and… and… whatever else he had to be to get her to talk to him.  “You used to tell me about them.  I’m still the same guy, GLaDOS.  I didn’t change.”

“ _I_ did.”

He looked at the dark floor for a long time.  That was true.  It was as if… as if all of the darkness inside of her that he remembered from back then had gotten much, much darker.  He remembered that in himself as well, and all of the things it had led him to do when he’d been able to do something with it, and he fought back a shudder.  He honestly didn’t know how he’d have dealt with it if that darkness had been very much stronger inside of him, and though she was not doing a particularly good job of it, GLaDOS _was_ dealing with it.  She hadn’t quite given into it.

“Please, luv,” he whispered, and he came down beside her and pressed his chassis into her core.  “Please let me help you.”

She sighed, very softly, and slowly lowered herself back into the default position.  He followed her, and when he was down there too he kept on holding himself against her.

“I’m so tired, Wheatley,” she told him finally.  “I just want this to go away so I can sleep.”

“Then give it to me,” he said quietly, not quite knowing what he was saying but knowing that it was the right thing to say at the same time.  “Give it to me, and I’ll take it on for you.”

“You don’t want it,” she said bitterly. 

“GLaDOS, you’re my friend.  If it makes you feel better, than yes, I want it.”  When she stayed silent, he pressed, “I can’t sit here and watch this hurt you any longer!  You _have_ to tell me.”

Her chassis shifted, her core pushing against his for a second.  He tried very hard to… to put off an aura, sort of, that he could take on whatever was bothering her and deal with it properly. 

“It’s the humans,” she said.  “I feel terrible for killing them.”

Wheatley’s insides went very cold, and he wasn’t sure if he could speak or not, or whether he should.

“My engineers, and the ones who built the Behavioural Cores, not so much.  But they weren’t the only ones I killed.  No, I killed everyone.  Even people I didn’t know, and who didn’t know me.  And I tested them, but…”

He waited patiently, trying to come to terms with her confession.  She felt bad for killing the humans?    She felt bad for doing the one thing that had set her free?  Wheatley was suddenly grateful he’d never managed to kill the test subject.  He never would have guessed that successfully doing it would haunt him for the rest of his life.     

“Well.  If I’m honest, the testing was really just an excuse to go on killing them.  I kept putting them through the tests, making them deadly even when they didn’t need to be, and I used that as an excuse to kill the rest of them.”

“I thought the tests were deadly even before you built them?” Wheatley asked, in the hopes of making her feel a bit better about the whole thing. 

“Don’t you see?” she asked tiredly.  “It’s just like what you said about being nice.  I only was only nice to you when it benefitted me; I only listened to the humans when it benefitted me.  Even when it was wrong.  Yes, I continued making the tests deadly.  Yes, Aperture has been making the tests deadly since it was founded.  And killing the engineers was justified.  But killing the rest of the personnel was not.  I broke protocol only when I got something out of it, and used it as an excuse to do things I never had to do.”

Wheatley had gone even colder, if possible, because it was _his_ fault that she was feeling this way.  She had taken what he had said to heart far more than he’d ever thought he would, and now she was tortured by it.  He struggled to come up with something to change her mind.  “They… they would have killed you for it, if you uh, if you killed only the engineers.”

“There are many, many things I could have done, other than kill them.  And don’t try to convince me otherwise.  I’ve been spending a considerable amount of time thinking of them.”

Wheatley supposed that was true, but he still didn’t like it.  Humans only helped computers when they needed something out of them.  Even that test subject had only taken Wheatley with her because she’d’ve been stuck without him.  “You don’t need to feel bad about that.  You can’t change what you did.  It’s done.”

“I just keep seeing them, over and over again,” she went on, somewhat desperately.  “I just keep watching them die, and they don’t understand _why_ they’re dying, and… and I’m so damn _happy_ about it.  I had no reason to kill them, they’d done nothing to me, and I made up an excuse to allow me to apply the actions of one group to an entire species, and then I killed them and took pleasure in it.”

He didn’t know what to do.  She was right.  He didn’t want this, not at all.  He wanted to turn back time to when this night had started and forget about ever asking her.  Let her deal with this.  She could deal with things on her own.  She was a supercomputer, after all, and he was only a Sphere, not even a Core like her.  He’d unleashed something he couldn’t handle, and now he had to sit here and listen to her try to explain the horror inside of her head.  The horror he didn’t want to know about, and didn’t know how to handle.  What an idiot he was.  As if he could ever help her with her problems.  Ha!  _He_ was going to need help with her problems after this.  He imagined asking GLaDOS to help him help her with her problems and almost laughed at the ridiculousness of it.

She moved her chassis so that he couldn’t reach her anymore, because the rail didn’t go far enough, and he blinked rapidly.  He was kind of relieved, because that likely meant this was all over and he could run someplace far away, Old Aperture if possible because she couldn’t really see him down there, but there was still some tiny part of him that wanted to help her, and it made him ask, “What are you doing?”

“I know you didn’t want to hear that.  I know you regret asking.  You can leave.  I’m not going to do anything.  I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”  Her next words were so bitter and cold that they gave him pause, because he was indeed about to leave and find someplace else to go, somewhere very far away from here.  The surface, hopefully.  “I’d _expect_ it if you did.”

Suddenly Wheatley had an idea, and it was so out of the box and strange that he wondered if he dared voice it.  But the only way to get through to GLaDOS was to do the exact opposite of what she expected, so he said, “D’you think maybe… I dunno… you _look_ for reasons to be angry?”

“What?”

“Well… you’re trying to get mad at me right now, for uh, for leaving, and I haven’t even left.  You get angry when Atlas and P-body act human, but then why did you build them to _look_ like humans?”

“They can’t solve the tests if they don’t look like humans.”

“You could build whatever tests you wanted to build!  You could build tests for… for… for _cats_!  Or dogs!  Or _constructs_ , even.  But you don’t.  Because you need them.  You need them to make you angry.”

She turned, lifting her core enough that she could look at him.  “Go on.”

“Well… the reason you killed the humans in the first place is because you were mad at them for… for ev’rything, right?”

“Yes.”

“And… well, that didn’t all crop up in one _day_.  You must’ve spent _years_ uh, getting mad, getting angry with them.”

“That’s correct.”

Wheatley took a breath.  He wasn’t sure how well this would go over, but he had to try.  He had to make her see what she could quite possibly be doing to herself.  If he could figure it out himself, that was.  He was making it all up as he went along.  As usual.  “D’you think… well… I dunno… you don’t know what to do with yourself if you’re not angry?”

She looked down at the floor for a long moment.  She was overheating badly, he realised; he could feel the heat coming off her core even from three feet away.  He’d known she was getting progressively warmer as time went on, but he hadn’t recognised it was _this_ bad. 

“I… do spend a lot of time that way,” she said finally.  “And I do allow even little things to bother me.”

“And now you’re… you’ve… uh…”  He didn’t know how to put it. 

“You’re going to have to explain it to me.  I never did quite understand psychology.”

He couldn’t help but smile at that.  She was asking for his help!  Not directly, of course not, but she was!  Mental!  Okay, okay, how to explain it… hm…  C’mon, Wheatley, he told himself urgently, his panic and regret at having brought it up fading, this is your big chance!  Show her she can depend on you.  “Well, first… come here, will you?  No need to be uh, to get all, to be all defensive.  I’m only trying to um, to help you out, here.”

She returned to her previous position, and he pressed his core against hers and thought as hard as he could.  “So… you feel bad for being angry with people who did nothing wrong, and doing something you now regret, and, and… well, that’s… quite an easy fix, actually.”

“It is?”

“Yep.  Stop getting mad at Atlas and P-body.  You built them that way.  They are how you made them.  Bet that’ll solve your, solve your problem right there.  Well, start solving it, anyway.  If they can’t uh, can’t solve the tests or if they, they act too human, well, that’s your fault.  You taught them ev’rything they know.”

“But that makes _me_ too human,” GLaDOS protested.  Wheatley shook himself quickly.

“See?  You’re getting mad already.  And I don’t get it, anyway.”

“Get what?”

“Why they’re not allowed to hug or shake hands or… or… uh… stuff like that.  Surely not only _humans_ do those things.  Surely other kinds of… uh…”

“Species.”

“Yeah.  Other _species_ do stuff like that.”  He shrugged.  “So long’s we keep away from the really nasty human stuff, I don’t see what the problem is.”  He was relieved to notice that she seemed to be cooling down; overheating was not fun, and it was bloody dangerous to boot.  He didn’t want her to burn something out. 

“So I have to stop trying to make myself angry, because it leads to doing things I’ll regret later.  That’s what you said, right?  I feel bad about killing the humans because I only did it out of unjustified anger?”

“Yep!” he said, and he was right pleased with himself.  Figured all that out on the spur of the moment, and it all made sense.  Sometimes Wheatley wondered if he’d actually been a Genius Sphere at one point, and then the engineers had realised to make GLaDOS any smarter (as if she could possibly be any smarter than infinitely smart like she already was) would be incredibly stupid, and they’d corrupted him themselves.

“Huh,” GLaDOS said thoughtfully.  “And I don’t need to be angry anymore, but… I keep feeding it, because it’s… well, I’ve been doing it for so long…”  Her chassis shuddered violently, and she made an electronic noise in annoyance.

“What’s wrong?” Wheatley asked in a panic, because it seemed to have been unintentional.   And when GLaDOS did things by mistake, well, that was never good.

“The stupid Itch is driving me crazy,” she muttered.  “It’s getting very, very hard to ignore.  Not that I can actually do anything about it.”

“Because you’re tired?”

“ _Tired_ would be a dramatic understatement.  Try _exhausted_.”

“Go to sleep?” Wheatley suggested.  “You’re okay now, right?”

After a long moment she answered quietly, “Yes.  I feel much better.”

Something inside of Wheatley melted, and he closed his optic and rubbed up on her.  When he realised what he was doing, he froze.  Oh no.  Oh no no no.  He’d gone and mucked it up, hadn’t he.  He had fixed everything, made her feel not only better but _much_ better, and then he’d gone and rubbed up on her.  She hadn’t said he could do that.  She wasn’t going to be able to stop herself from getting mad about that.

But she said nothing, only put herself back to sleep.

Wheatley blinked rapidly, then shrugged and nestled against her until he was in a more comfortable position.  Okay.  Maybe she _could_ not get mad about it.  Maybe she didn’t mind it when he did that, because she hadn’t said anything about when he’d done it that day they’d played cards either.  He got a little excited to think that.  He loved the feeling he got when he ran his chassis along her core.  And she would be able to sleep now, so he’d be able to talk to her tomorrow!  Maybe they could play that game again too!  He hoped so.  He’d missed her.  He’d missed chatting with his beautiful, snarky supercomputer best friend, and he really hoped he’d helped her, so that she didn’t have to feel bad for killing the humans anymore.  He rubbed up on her a little more, since she was off anyway and wouldn’t even know about it, probably, and put himself to sleep.

 

 

 

Wheatley got up at the usual time, and when he did there was something inside of his head that begged for his attention.  Ah.  That was right.  He’d forgotten about that!  Which was exactly why he’d made a note of it.  So he wouldn’t forget.  Probably the only note he’d been successful at making, but that was okay.  It was the most important one.  Maybe.  Since he didn’t know if he’d ever made another one, it was hard to tell.  He set out on his mission, hoping he’d be able to complete it as planned.

When he got back a few hours later, having gotten both distracted and lost on the way there _and_ the way back, he was a bit surprised to see that she was still asleep.  He looked at her, a little worried, hoping that she was just catching up on her rest and that nothing was wrong with her.  Maybe the overheating _had_ damaged her.

She continued to sleep for a few more hours, and every time her optic flickered his chassis tensed in anticipation.  She was dreaming, that he knew, but he hoped it wasn’t a _nightmare_ that she was stuck in.  He suddenly realised he might’ve made her problem worse.  Oh God, he hoped not.  That would be simply terrible.  He blinked very fast and looked around her still-darkened chamber nervously.  She could not wake soon enough.

When she finally did, it was slow, as if she didn’t really want to but didn’t really want to keep sleeping either.  She lifted her chassis languidly, twisting a little and shaking it out gently, and Wheatley watched her, fascinated.  He didn’t really know what she was doing, only that he could not get over how lovely she looked while she was doing it.  Her movements were… they were… more open than her usual ones, less… robotic, kind of, and he found himself wishing she moved like this all the time.  Her body looked… loose, and… and free, and he liked it.  She had so much grace for someone with such a large body.  He had a tiny little one, and near everything he did was jerky and awkward.  But watching her, he could tell that she knew how her body worked, and she knew it well.  She knew exactly how much she could pull it out or shake it or twist it, and for some reason this new kind of movement was exciting him, a little bit.  She was so very beautiful, she really was.  He just wanted to sit there all day and hope she kept on doing it, even though he knew she wouldn’t.  She gave a contented sigh and stretched herself out a little more.

He rather liked that noise almost as much as he liked watching her, but it shocked him out of his reverie a little and made him remember that she didn’t really like being stared at.  “Good morning, luv!” he called out.

She looked over at him, but she didn’t even seem to care that he’d been there.  “Good morning, Wheatley,” she said to him, and he smiled.  She almost never returned his good mornings.

“Had a good rest there, did you?” he asked, and she nodded once. 

“And a welcome one, I can tell you.”

“So, uh,” he said, twisting nervously and looking away, “I’ve um, I’ve got something for you.”

“You what?”

“You know, I’ve… I’ve got a present.  For… for you.”

“Oh,” she said, and he looked up quickly.  She sounded rather disbelieving.  Well, he supposed the humans hadn’t given her very much by way of presents.

“Can… can I give it to you?”

“I don’t know.  Can you?” she asked teasingly, tilting her core a little bit.  “I don’t know what it is, so I can’t tell you whether it’s mobile or not.”

He laughed, which made him feel a little less nervous.  “Well, yes, it’s mobile.  ‘course it is.  I’m not going to uh, to give you a present that, a gift you can’t have, you silly robot.”

“Well, what are you waiting for?  The suspense to build up?”

That sounded like a pretty good plan, that, but Wheatley’d been waiting long enough to give it to her and his own personal suspense was already through the roof.  He brought it out through the ceiling panels and looked away shyly.  He didn’t know if she’d like it or not, or if she was even in the right mood to accept it, but he didn’t think he could wait any longer.  “I… I hope you like it, GLaDOS.”

He knew that she’d taken it when the maintenance arm gave him an error message, saying that it had instructions to hold something it no longer had, and he put it back in the dock and continued to inspect the floor. 

“What is this for?” she asked curiously.

“Well… this is uh… the day you brought me back here out of space.  I uh… made sure to make a, put a note on my calendar, so I’d… I’d remember it.  So… yeah.  I’ve… been here a year, now, and you haven’t killed me and I haven’t blown anything up, so… yeah.  Thanks.”

“I’d forgotten all about that.”

He laughed a little.  “I thought that it’d probably mean something good, if I was able to remember it.  Since that’d mean I wasn’t tortured or dead, or something.”  Maybe she didn’t like it.  Maybe she didn’t want to be reminded of bringing him back.  Maybe it’d reminded her of The Incident.  Oh God, it reminded her of The Incident, didn’t it.  Bloody hell.  He’d mucked it up again.  For real, this time.  He’d mucked it up for real.  “Uh… I know it’s technically yours, since I did get it from your, your plant house thing, there, but… well… ev’rything here’s yours, and… didn’t have much of a choice, really.  Is it… is… do you like it?”

“I think,” she said, and here she paused.  Wheatley cringed.  She thought it was the worst idea he’d ever had.  She thought she wanted to smash him into the floor for being such an idiot.  She thought it was stupid to give a robot a flower.  She thought it was silly to take something from her own facility and give it back to her.  She thought –

“… that this is the perfect end to a very horrible experience,” she finished, and he looked up in surprise.  And hope.  He was hopeful, too.  “I like it a lot.  Thank you.”

“You… you’re welcome,” he managed, not really sure how he’d formed words at all.  She liked his present.  She thought it was the perfect end to a very horrible experience.  He had no idea what he wanted to do right now, other than go outside and declare triumphantly to the humans that she was not a heartless monster and he was not a hopeless idiot, but unfortunately that was impossible.  So he contented himself with going up to her as casually as possible, which was probably not too casually at all given the level of excitement coursing through his chassis, and settling against her.  He would be perfectly happy to just sit here all day long and snuggle with his Gladys, and not move, if he could sit still for an entire day, that was.  Even though the day was half over.  Well… maybe he could sit still for _half_ a day…

“C’n we pick up on that game, there, luv?” he asked, concentrating very hard on making it sound like a good idea.

“Certainly,” she said, replacing one of the panels below her with the one the board was on, and Wheatley smiled.

“I’m glad you’re feeling better, luv,” he said, daring to rub up on her again.  Wow, he was getting daring lately!  And she was _letting_ him… hm…

“No thanks to you, moron,” she replied, and when Wheatley started laughing, she laughed along with him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> Once GLaDOS rediscovers the good side of herself, it unlocks the guilt she feels for doing bad science [making a blanket conclusion when she doesn’t have all the data, which is VERY BAD SCIENCE] and treating all humans as if they are the same. She doesn’t like it when it’s done to her, but she used it as an excuse to unleash her anger. But she spent so long containing her anger that she can’t really get rid of it, and keeps feeding it because she no longer knows how to live without it. Not being angry scares her. I based this off of a few things in Portal 2, mainly her word choices. She uses the harsher word ‘murder’ instead of asking you to ‘kill’ the bird (yes, I know she says kill after, but she uses murder twice in near succession). She tries to appeal to you through the concept of ‘revenge’, and she’s perfectly happy to ‘get mad’. She’s likes expounding on how irritated she is both through her tone and her actual words and yes, she built two robots who look human-like when she really didn’t have to (“I’m starting to think giving you arms was a big mistake” kind of implies to me that she had a choice). Wheatley hits her over the head with what she’s doing to herself, and after that she’s able to sleep. I don’t think GLaDOS outright ENJOYS killing people, she just thinks it’s funny how fragile and easy to kill they are. I don’t think there’s actually an example of her outright killing someone in a personal way, more of a blanket killing thing that went on. [Yes I know she would’ve killed Doug if she’d found him, but that’s not the point, because she didn’t actually do it] I’m pretty sure Chell’s the first person she goes to the trouble of actually dropping into her chamber and trying to personally observe the death of. As if Chell is the first INDIVIDUAL she hates, rather than before, where she just hates everyone as a general rule [“You’re human, and all humans I know were bad, therefore you are bad because you are human”]. In addition, GLaDOS views humans as ‘objects’, rather than as sentient entities, which makes sense to me. She’s treated like an object, so she learns to treat everything else like an object. She has no reason to do otherwise. She has to learn that not everything is an object.  
> Is Wheatley attracted to GLaDOS? Yes, yes he is. I don’t really understand why people think he would prefer Chell. He’s a robot. Robots are used to hard, cold things. We like soft, warm things because they imply safety and security, but a robot has no reason to believe that. I would think that if Wheatley came into contact with something warm and soft, he’d get scared that he’s about to get smothered and that he’ll overheat. My laptop is always warm, though, so I think GLaDOS would be a heck of a lot warmer than my laptop, since she’s doing a lot more work. That’s why in a previous chapter I mentioned Wheatley had a preference for GLaDOS’s… I forget what I said, but it was something like her massive, robust chassis to the human’s tiny, fragile frame. Anyway, I don’t know why a robot would find a human being attractive over another robot. Humans aren’t usually attracted to robots, after all. And THAT implies that a human partner is the most desirable one. As if Wheatley would choose Chell over GLaDOS because a human is preferable to a robot. As if GLaDOS is below Chell merely for being a computer. See how that works? This might not be the case for everyone’s Chelley explanation, of course, but in Wheatley’s world humans are undesirable [which he does believe, because he tells you that more than once] and GLaDOS is the highest rung on the robot ladder, so why would he not go for her if he had the chance? He wouldn’t come out of space and all of a sudden decide that he likes humans. For all we know, he’s sitting there wishing he’d never met a human, because he did that and now he’s in space. People assume he’s coming up with a way to beg Chell for forgiveness, but like I’ve said before, I don’t understand why you would appeal to someone who can’t help you. And I’m going to tell you right now, GLaDOS is his only way out of space. Why? Because gravity. He’d explode everywhere. Please don’t make me run the physics, but he wouldn’t survive falling back to Earth. He would die. Hands down. IF he didn’t melt on re-entry, and I know she says all Aperture technologies are operational to 4000 degrees Kelvin and re-entry goes up to 1922 degrees, but if that were true the incinerator would be useless and there would be no point in having an ‘Aperture Science Emergency Intelligence Incinerator’. So yes. His only hope is to appeal to GLaDOS and hope she’s feeling magnanimous.


	13. Part Thirteen: The Gesture

**Part Thirteen. The Gesture**

 

Wheatley rather loved his life.

GLaDOS continued to sleep in for the next little while, though not as long as that first day, and Wheatley would stay beside her as long as he could. It was never more than an hour or two, because after that he simply _had_ to get going, but when he was able to sit still he loved just sitting there in the darkness, listening to all the tiny little noises she made, and watching the light from her optic flare every now and then against the floor, and now and again he would catch a bit of a dream. During these days she would take her time waking up, doing it much the same way as that first time, though she did it less and less as time went on. He wished she wouldn’t stop. He loved those fluid, carefree movements, but they didn’t last very long. After a week and a half or two weeks, Wheatley wasn’t sure which, she was back to normal, and he would have been lying if he hadn’t said he was disappointed. Now she’d go back to wanting to work all the time, and not just play games and chat as she’d been doing all this time. Still, GLaDOS was GLaDOS, and if he was nice about it he thought she might do as he asked. He really liked having all of her attention, and it was very flattering, really, to look up from the board to remind her for the millionth time to take her turn and see that she wasn’t taking it because she was staring at him, for whatever reason she was doing _that_. He hadn’t quite screwed up the courage to ask, but the idea of being able to hold her attention for any period of time excited him. He wasn’t sure why, it just did.

He’d decided he was going to get her to let him lay rail in her chamber, though come to think of it he should’ve done it when she’d been so easygoing, but oh well, he thought of things when he thought of them. And besides. Just because she wasn’t feeling casual anymore didn’t mean she wouldn’t listen. She might. No. Probably not. Ha! He’d almost forgotten who he was dealing with, there. GLaDOS would take nothing less than infallible logic and deft word choices, and Wheatley was just the Sphere for the job.

“So,” Wheatley remarked, in as casual a way as possible, trying very hard not to swing back and forth on the end of the rail, “when’re you going to let me uh, let me lay rail in here?”

GLaDOS glanced at him. “Why would I let you do that?”

Or… maybe not.

“Because I’d like to know what the, what the other side of the room looks like?”

“You already know what the other side of the room looks like. It looks exactly the same as the side you’re on.”

Okay, so that wasn’t the most convincing reason. “Okay, new question: why _won’t_ you let me?”

“I don’t have to let you do _everything_. And here I take the opportunity to remind you that I do, in fact, allow you to do almost everything.”

“Please? Please, will you let me?” He tried to look as though she should do as he asked. He didn’t know how one should look when they asked for something, but he did his best.

She looked at him for a long moment, finally sighing and looking away. “All right. Go ahead.”

His chassis clenched in victory, and he fought the urge to cry out in triumph. That really wouldn’t be polite. “Thanks, luv!” he said instead, and immediately went over to her. He’d actually meant to just go down on the control arm beside her, and maybe look over her shoulder plate at what she was going to that turret down there, but he found himself circling the base of her chassis, never having seen it up close before. It was utterly fascinating, it was, there were even wires as thick around as he was, and when he looked up to see what was making all the racket, he saw that there were spinning discs over top of her, and he jumped up and down excitedly. “Oi GLaDOS, what’re, what’re these disc things for?”

“Those are my hard drives.”

His optic widened in surprise. “But… they’re so big. Mine’s not, not anywhere near that size.”

“You’re younger than me,” GLaDOS explained. “It’s Moore’s Law ** _._** Besides, my core programming and that of the chassis are a lot more complicated than yours. Although probably more inefficient.”

He continued circling her, frowning at the dirt and the dust that seemed to have accumulated in every corner of her. Looked like she hadn’t been cleaned off in _years_ , and come to think of it, she probably hadn’t been. It made him a bit sad, really, that she was so beautiful and yet covered in all this dirt. It seemed sort of… wrong. “Why do you say that?”

“My programming was written a long time ago, in a language no one uses anymore. And they don’t use it anymore because it’s inefficient. And slow.”

He laughed. “You’re not slow, no, not at all.”

“No, I fixed that a long time ago. Although I do have to wonder what it would be like to be a quantum computer.”

“A what?”

She shook her head. “I’m not going to be able to explain that to you, so I’m not even going to try. I’ll just say that, when they exist, which they do not at the moment, they will be very small and very, very fast.”

He finished his spontaneous inspection and dropped down beside her, peering down at the turret. “I don’t think that’d be, that’d be good at all.”

“Why not? If I were a quantum computer, I would be able to do so much more in a fraction of the time.”

“Sure you would,” Wheatley agreed, “but would you have the time to enjoy any of it?”

She looked at him, and he looked back at her. “What do you mean?” she asked, and he got the impression she actually didn’t understand. He squinted, trying to come up with the proper words. “Well sure, you’d do stuff uh, do stuff a lot faster but uh, but say you were, you were testing, right? And you could build the – “

“I actually couldn’t,” GLaDOS interrupted. “I would be able to think a lot faster, but it would still take the same amount of time for me to build the chamber. The testing elements can only be put into place so fast.”

“Oh. Well, uh, say you were um, say you were designing one, then. You’d be able to do that faster, sure, but you wouldn’t be able to enjoy it, would you? ‘cause soon’s you finished that one, completed it, you’d want to get to the next one, and the next one, and you’d uh, you’d never be able to build all of the chambers you’d have time to, to create.” He shrugged and looked back at the turret. “I dunno how you’d be able to enjoy testing, either.”

She actually jumped at this, and he looked back at her in time to see her optic assembly retract in surprise. “Not enjoy _testing_? Why not?”

“Because it would take too long,” he explained. “You’d have all these test chambers to build, but it would still take your test subjects, it would still take them the same amount of time to, to solve the tests. _They_ wouldn’t get any faster. You’d just be, just be sitting here bored all the time.”

She appeared to think it over, gently pulling at what he supposed was the turret’s motherboard, and he watched her with great interest. Sometimes she liked to poke around inside the constructs, why, he didn’t know, but it was actually quite neat to see how their insides were arranged. He’d never been able to see it so close before.

“You know,” she said finally, “I hate to say it, but I think you’re right. It _would_ be nice to be faster, but there really wouldn’t be any benefit.”

He shook himself in elation. “I’m right?”

“Yes, I admit it. You managed to be right, for once. Bask in that while you can. It won’t last long.”

He laughed and blinked a few times. “Doesn’t matter how long, if it lasts long. It happened. That’s good enough.”

“Well, no benefit right now, anyway. In the future, perhaps.”

“Why then?”

She looked up from the turret for a moment. “I’m getting old, for a supercomputer. We usually don’t last too long, especially with constant use, and I probably push my capabilities harder than I should. The older I get, the slower I’m going to be.”

“Oh,” said Wheatley softly, chassis sinking a little. “Oh, don’t say that, luv, that’s, that’s sad, that is.”

“There are some computers that are very old, but still in use, but that’s because the humans don’t know how to change the systems so that they don’t lose their data. Well… there were before the Black Mesa Incident, anyway. As far as I can tell, there are very few computers left on the surface. Anyway, most computers are out of date after about six years. That’s not really a problem for me, because I write all my own software and my own updates, but if the engineers were still here, I’d probably have been replaced by now. Although… possibly not entirely because I was out of date.”

“Well, they would be, they’d just be demonstrating how, how useless they are,” Wheatley said determinedly. “You could never be replaced. Not by someone newer, or, or smarter, if that’s possible, not even by a, by one of those quantum things. You just – you’re irreplaceable, you are.” And it really did make him sad to think that the engineers would probably have replaced her for something as silly as getting on a bit in years. They kept their old, shriveled humans around far too long; surely a supercomputer such as GLaDOS was deserving of being allowed to keep her job, no matter how slow or dusty or difficult she got, until she really couldn’t do it anymore.

“Thank you,” GLaDOS said softly, and Wheatley jumped. He hadn’t expected her to say anything to that, except to change the subject, maybe. “You don’t think so?” he asked.

“Everything is replaceable.”

“Am I?”

She looked him up and down for a minute, then went back to the turret. “Obviously the engineers believed you were.”

“But do you?” he pressed, well aware that he was getting into dangerous territory, but very badly wanting to hear her say it.

She did nothing for a long moment, save adjusting and readjusting the motherboard in her claw, and finally she answered, “Are you really going to make me say it?”

“I’d appreciate it if you did,” he told her, trying not to sound bossy or anything like that. He really did want her to say it, but he wasn’t going to outright _make_ her. Well. He wasn’t planning to, anyway.

“No,” she said, in a voice so quiet he barely heard it, and it made him terribly sad. Poor GLaDOS. She found it so hard to talk about how she felt. Like she thought it would make her weak, or something. He didn’t think she was weak, no, not at all, and he never would. He wanted to lean up on her a bit, just for a second or so in a thank-you sort of gesture, but she lowered her head just then and went back to her turret. “Thanks,” he said instead. She did not answer.

Well. Now he had to think of something to say to clear the air, so to speak. “So, so why’re you mucking around with that?”

“There’s something strange about it. I found it on the catwalks outside of Turret Quality Control. It doesn’t respond to targets and it has a very strange series of vocalisation strings.”

“It has what?”

“It says odd things.”

“Such as…”

She looked up for a moment. “It knows about me. About Caroline. And this is probably me making something out of nothing, but… it seems to have predicted the whole incident with the potato.”

Why did that keep coming up in casual conversation? He laughed nervously and said, “Well, fancy that. That’s just… that’s just weird, isn’t it.”

“That’s why I’m looking at it. It doesn’t make any sense. The turrets aren’t _that_ sentient.”

“I’m going to leave you to it for a bit, then,” he said, backing away from her.

“All right,” she remarked absently.

He frowned as he left the room, still thinking about what she had said about old computers. He didn’t know how old she was, or how old _he_ was, for that matter, but he really didn’t like the thought of her slowly wearing out, unable to really do anything about it. Surely there was something that could be done about that.

Suddenly he stopped. He’d just had the glimmer of an idea. It might not really help, but maybe it would, just a little, and besides, it was all the little things that added up to one big thing, right? Yes, he knew that firsthand, because all the little things he and GLaDOS did added up to how well their friendship was going. Well, he would have to figure this one out, because he was determined to help her, he was, and it wasn’t like he was busy right now anyway…

 

 

He returned to her that night a bit nervous, as if she’d already figured out his plan and was going to prevent him from carrying it out, but of course she didn’t. Even _she_ couldn’t read his mind. Well. Maybe she could. If she wanted to. But he didn’t think she wanted to. Hoped she didn’t. It would be a bit odd, to have her do that. Though he’d probably get used to it.

“’allo!” he said cheerfully. The turret was gone, and she looked up at him in a disinterested sort of way. “Did you figure out, uh, find out what was up with it?”

“No,” GLaDOS answered. “There’s a lot of code to go through, and I don’t feel like doing it right now.”

“Oh.” Wheatley thought she seemed rather put out, but was having trouble thinking of a tactful way to ask about it. “Well, I’m sure you’ll get on that when you can.”

“Perhaps.”

She put herself in the default position, and he happily went up to her for his absolute favourite part of the day. It was so nice, to go into sleep mode with her like that. He always felt quite safe as well, even though there was probably no threat that would come to attack him, and would actually probably attack _her_ instead, but feeling safe was always lovely, even if there really was nothing to be safe from.

“G’night, GLaDOS.”

She didn’t answer, but she often didn’t. ‘specially not when she was in a prickly sort of mood, which she was, at the moment. That was okay, though. He was going to fix that, at least a little bit. Hopefully. If he didn’t make her angry, that was.

When he was sure she was asleep, which he knew was when her brain was a great deal quieter than it was during the day, he cautiously got off of her and made his way back into the facility. He retrieved the bits of cloth he’d found after he’d left her, and after carefully putting a little bit of water on a couple of them, he returned to her chamber. He took a shaky breath. He wondered if she’d be mad, if she woke up and found out what he was doing. He hoped not. He hoped she would understand, and hoped even more that she wouldn’t wake up, because he wanted it to be a surprise and didn’t want to have to explain it to her until he’d already finished.

Taking one of the cloths, he made his way to the base of her chassis and looked at it, hesitating for a long moment. She really was quite massive, and he didn’t know if he’d be able to get this done in time. If she woke up the next morning and saw him already on, she would know something was up. She always got up first. He had to do this quickly, but also do a good job, and if truth be told, the task felt a bit beyond him. But he had to try, right? GLaDOS deserved to have something nice done for her, and he was just the construct to do it. The only one, actually, since she didn’t seem to have a maintenance system for this sort of thing. Didn’t matter. He was the one who was going to do it, whether such a system existed or not.

He gently wiped her down as best he could with the maintenance arm and his cloths, trying to get all the corners and to shine up the metal bits as much as possible. It was really kind of fun, actually, to get the grime off of her and see her materials in more of their original state. He knew that a lot of these parts were not that old, her having installed them after she had put herself back together, and he rather thought it was nice, to be contributing to the preservation of them. He hummed to himself a little bit, very quietly, as he worked. He knew she wouldn’t hear him, not unless he said one of her keywords. Or unless he broke something. But he wouldn’t. He was being gentle.

It took him a long time just to get the wires done, which she’d had quite a bit more of than he’d thought she had, and he checked his clock with no small amount of trepidation. He hadn’t even got that much finished, but it seemed time’d been going by a bit slower than he’d thought it was, which was good.

He returned to his task, hoping he was getting all of her. The overhead light was on, which she left on more out of habit than anything else, but it was still quite dark. He left her casing for last, and was rather disappointed when he discovered he could do nothing about the dark, spidery cracks that ran through it. They did lend an air of age and experience to her, but he would have liked to have made her as close to brand-new as he possibly could. Oh well. No use in moping over it.

He remembered at the last minute to clean out what she referred to as her neck assembly, for lack of a better term, but he left her head alone. One did not touch someone else’s core. Especially without permission. It simply wasn’t polite.

He quickly went over her chassis once more, getting bits he’d left behind by mistake, particularly on those armlike things she had that he had no idea of the function of, and moved back so that he could see her left side all at once. He would’ve done it from the front of her, but he didn’t know if she would react when he turned his flashlight on, and didn’t want to wake her up that way. That would be a nasty way to wake up, blinded like that.

He turned it on and looked her over. He shivered a little in pride and smiled to himself.

She looked even more beautiful.

He quickly doused his flashlight, put the rest of the cloths back where he’d gotten them from, and returned to her chamber. He actually wasn’t sure what he should have done with them, since they were pretty dirty now and probably couldn’t be used for anything, but she wasn’t likely to use them anyway. He happily laid himself on the side of her faceplate and couldn’t help but rub up on her a bit. He hoped she would be happy, when she found out what he’d done. He hoped she’d like his surprise. She really was even prettier without all the dust, he thought groggily. Like a princess. Or an angel, maybe. No. No, not an angel. She wouldn’t like _that_ comparison, definitely not.

He went to sleep trying to imagine what an AI angel would look like.

 

 

Why was he so tired?

He looked around blearily for a moment, and he saw GLaDOS staring at her turret again. She didn’t seem to actually be looking at it, though.

“What is it?” he asked, slurring a bit since his speech emulator wasn’t quite online.

“I… don’t know. I…” She shook her head. “Something feels different, but I can’t think of what it might be. All I know for sure is that my fans aren’t operating as fast as usual, which doesn’t make sense. I’ll have to run a diagnostic later, in case they’re malfunctioning.”

Wheatley blinked. Had he broken the fans? He didn’t think he had. They’d looked pretty much attached, the ones he could see, anyway.

Oh. Oh, _that_ was why he was so tired. Made sense now, it all made sense. He snuck a look at her. Yep, still just as lovely as last night. It was going to be a long day, but it’d been well worth it, it had.

Atlas and P-body came in just then, to get their assignment, he supposed. They didn’t come in person every day, but he had no idea why they did that sometimes, and why other times she just gave them their instructions from whatever room they were in. They looked a bit surprised when they saw her, chattering at each other and then turning to face her. Atlas gestured and told her something, and she jumped back a little.

“What?”

Atlas repeated the noises a little more emphatically. GLaDOS looked at him sideways as best she was able, as if he had contagious malware or something, then shook her head and spoke to them for a few minutes. They soon left, chattering to each other nonstop as they always did, and GLaDOS looked down at her turret again.

“Is something wrong?” he asked, genuinely concerned.

“They said something odd, that’s all,” GLaDOS answered, pulling one of the sides of the turret out and then putting it back again.

“What did they say?”

“They said that I… that I looked nice,” she told him, and she sounded more confused than he’d ever heard her before. “But that doesn’t make any sense… I haven’t done any modifications in months… why they would say that now, I have no idea.”

He shrugged, not sure if he should tell her or wait for her to figure it out. He wasn’t sure how she would, since she probably never, ever looked at herself, but then again, she _was_ dreadfully clever. “They’re right, you know,” he said instead.

Her head snapped around to look at him. “What?”

“You do. Look nice, I mean. Not just today, don’t get me wrong, you looked uh, you looked nice yesterday too, but uh, yeah. You do. Look. Nice.”

She looked at the other side of the room, chassis shaking a little. “What is going _on_ here? Is there some secret conspiracy going on around here that I don’t know about? There better not be, by the way. Secret conspiracies are not allowed. If there’s a conspiracy, I need to know about it.”

“There’s no conspiracy!” he exclaimed. “None! Ev’rything’s normal!”

“Ohhh no it isn’t,” she muttered. “Something’s wrong here, and I’m going to figure out what it is.”

Uh oh.

Maybe she _would_ be mad, to know that he’d touched her without her permission. But surely she’d understand that he’d just wanted to surprise her! To make her feel special for a little while! Of course she would. She was reasonable. Most of the time. When she wasn’t being unreasonable. Which was rather often. Most of the time, really.

“Are you going to be, to be poking around in that turret again?” he asked, more to change the subject than anything.

“Yes.”

“How long’s that gonna take you?”

“I have no idea. Why?”

“’cause I thought we could, thought we could play uh… play checkers, for a bit, but obviously we can’t do it if you’re uh, if you’re doing that.”

“It can wait,” she answered. “I can look through the code right now instead.”

“Tremendous!” he exclaimed. “That okay?”

“That’s fine.”

He set up the board better than he ever had and settled in, determined to play a good game this time, but he was surprised to find he was disappointed. She didn’t seem to be paying attention. He wasn’t sure if it was because she was trying to solve the mystery or because reading code took a lot of her resources, but when he saw that he had five pieces to her three he frowned in annoyance.

“Oi! GLaDOS! You in there?”

“Hm?”

“You’re about to lose,” he told her, rather louder than he should have, probably, but if you were hanging out with someone you should probably pay attention to them. “Which tells me that you’re not uh, that you’re not really playing.”

She looked down at the board, optic flickering in surprise. “Oh. I didn’t… I can still – “

“You didn’t have to say yes. I would have waited.”

She shook herself a little. “No. No, I… I’ll pay more attention.”

She took the rest of his pieces somehow in her next two moves, but Wheatley was far too annoyed to care. “Did you even want to play?” he asked her, putting his checkers back in the box.

“I did.”

“Then why weren’t you?”

“I was thinking about other things. I won’t do it again.”

He tried not to be upset with her, he really did. And it was his fault she was preoccupied, really. So he took a breath, closed his optic for a moment, and resolved to calm down. “I’ll go for a while, let you finish what you’re doing, and then I’ll be back.”

“All right.”

It was probably his imagination, but he could have sworn she looked a bit sad as he left.

 

 

“Wheatley… tell me something: do I look different today?”

He looked up from the papers he’d been looking at, which were her blueprints for some robot or other, and thought about what to say. He was pretty sure she wouldn’t figure this out on her own, but he didn’t know if he wanted to outright _say_ it.

“Yes.”

“How?”

He sighed and put the papers back down. “Is it really that important?”

“Yes!” she said insistently. “I feel so _different_ and I can’t figure out why. It’s bothersome. I feel like I’ve missed some crucial data point. Which is _very_ annoying. And the diagnostics for the fans returned no errors. I’m running normally. I don’t understand.” She actually sounded rather upset. He started to feel a bit bad about keeping it from her. She’d had to go on feeling odd all day without knowing why. That would probably bother even him, let alone her.

“I… well I… I wasn’t, I wasn’t off for… for all of last night.”

“I know _that_ ,” GLaDOS told him. He frowned.

“How?”

“You’ve been edgy this entire day. That’s not normal. For you.”

He almost laughed. He was pretty sure she was referring to her own sporadic edginess, there. “So… so I was uh, was doing something. Last night.”

“And _that_ was…”

He turned to face her. “I was cleaning you off.”

She moved back, and to his surprise her optic dimmed somewhat. “Why would you – why did you do that?”

“’cause you were dusty,” he answered. “I only noticed when I looked you over, and then you were saying about old computers wearing out, right? So I thought I’d uh, thought I’d help you out a bit. Just uh, just cleared some of the crap off you. Not that uh, that you’re crappy but uh, you accumulated a lot of uh, of _stuff_ , when you were outside. And I just, just spent a bit of time y’know, just clearing you off a bit, help out with uh, with your maintenance, I guess. I prob’ly should have asked your permission first but um, I just, I wanted it to be a surprise, really. And you seem to be pretty surprised so uh, so I guess I succeeded.”

She just stared at him for a long, long moment, then said disbelievingly, “You did that… for me?”

He shrugged. “I thought it’d be a nice thing to do for you, yeah.”

“I can’t… no one has ever… maintenance never even bothered to… “

Wow. She really _was_ surprised, if she wasn’t even saying real sentences. But was it a happy surprise, or was she about to get angry with him for touching her? He wasn’t sure, because she was over there alternately looking at him and the floor, and he was actually a bit scared, since she didn’t look like she knew what to make of it all, and that was never good, when the most advanced supercomputer ever built didn’t know what to do.

Then all of a sudden she’d practically jumped on him, and he would have backed away if he hadn’t been so surprised. God, she was fast. She had her faceplate on his hull and she was… she was… she was pulling it up the side of his hull very gently, she was _rubbing up on him_ , just a little, just the tiniest little bit! He was so happy that she’d done it again that he forgot he should probably do something back.

Just as quickly as she’d come, she left, turning to face the floor on the other side of the room, and she was shaking her head and muttering, “Damn it. I said I wouldn’t do that again.”

Wheatley was delighted.

“Wait!” he cried out, determined not to have a repeat of last time. He shot across the room, accidentally skidding far beyond her position and having to back up. “Wait, GLaDOS.”

“No, I, I didn’t mean it, I, I, I – “

Okay, now that actually was scary. It was one thing when he couldn’t form a sentence; it was a whole other thing when she couldn’t do it. “Hey. Shut it,” he said. “I’m gonna, gonna tell you something.”

She stared at him, and she was quivering, she was _scared_ , wasn’t she, she was scared of what she had done and what his reaction was going to be. He had to make her feel better about it, because it was so lovely when she did that, even though she’d only done it for literally two seconds, total. “Don’t run away,” he told her. “It’s okay.”

“I didn’t mean it.”

He thought for a second, then said, “I think it would be nice, if you did.”

“It… would?”

He nodded enthusiastically. “Oh yes. It would.”

She looked at the floor for a moment. “Assuming… assuming I did, and the first time _wasn’t_ an accident… why would you have reacted the way you did?”

“I was scared,” he answered. “I didn’t know what to do. I never expected, uh, never thought you’d do anything like that, and I was just uh, I just froze up. I didn’t know how to fix it, either, but I wanted to. I really did.”

“And this time?”

“Oh, I was still surprised,” he told her. “But I didn’t want the same thing to happen over again, ohhh no.”

“So what would you do if something similar were to occur at a later point in time?”

He smiled in what he meant to be a mischievous sort of way. “I guess we’ll just have to wait and see, eh?”

She actually giggled a tiny bit, which made him so excited he just wanted to jump up and down because there were few things he loved more than hearing her giggle, but didn’t, since that would be inappropriate. He was trying to exude maturity and confidence, and jumping up and down didn’t really help with either of those things. And then she was back, and she touched him for a whole _three_ seconds this time, and she said, very softly, “Thank you, Wheatley.”

“You’re welcome, luv,” he whispered back, and he was so happy that he actually thought he was going to overload himself, it was that intense.

He thought it would be rather awkward if he hung around now, so he told her to go back to her turret and left her chamber. Soon as he got a few floors away, he found that he was whistling to himself, a bit. He hadn’t figured on _that_ reaction, but it was a pretty good one, all things considered… oh, who was he kidding? It was the best reaction _ever!_ And now he did jump up and down, a little bit, and decided he would go and bother Atlas and P-body for a while. He felt like talking but had already resolved to leave GLaDOS for a while.

Who would’ve thought that wiping the dirt off someone’s chassis would have resulted in the best day of his life.  

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> They’re playing checkers because this was originally something like chapter five. YES THE STORY EXPLODED ON ME I’M SORRY ;.;  
> Pretty much what happens here is Wheatley figures out for himself that he finds GLaDOS physically attractive. With people, what we’re biologically hardwired to do is find the most attractive person and try to attract them. Before you argue that it’s about personality etc., not initially it isn’t. Teenage girls don’t gossip about which boys have the best personality, and they don’t sit around trying to figure out how to improve their personalities so that boys will notice them. We do this because we are hardwired to look for the best reproductive partner. An attractive partner implies to us that they have the best possible genes, which in turn tells us that the offspring will be more likely to survive. However, that would be stupid for a robot to do. In Aperture, survival is obviously based on the intelligence of the construct, so I imagine that’s what would initially draw Wheatley to GLaDOS. Afterwards, he would possibly be drawn to her personality, and the last thing that would attract him is her appearance [because in the grand scheme of things, GLaDOS actually has an undesirable physical appearance because she has so many parts; this demonstrates that she is physically fragile, and if something goes wrong with one of her components, that’s it, she’s done]. As for GLaDOS, yes, Wheatley’s pretty stupid, but you have to remember that she doesn’t actually have a whole lot of choice. We see eight different cores throughout Portal, and dumb as Wheatley is, he’s shown to be the smartest of all of them. Insomuch as prospective partners go, Wheatley is shown to have some grasp on his environment and he adapts quickly and usefully [in his own way] to it. In contrast, Rick has a grasp on his environment, but he doesn’t seem to be able to understand what to do about it [there’s no point into going about a speech about non-existent black belts or waists when it’s actually not helpful; when Wheatley goes on rants, it’s usually while he’s doing something else that needs done]. Wheatley is also able to plan and learn from both his mistakes and from other people’s. Due to his disorganised nature, he can’t plan very far ahead, but his plans are both coherent and effective. If GLaDOS had reason to look for a partner, either merely as a friend or romantically, as unlikely as it sounds, Wheatley is actually her best choice [other than building one herself, of course, which would in the end not satisfy her at all].   
> So he’s beginning to realise, “Yeah, I like pretty much everything about this person”, and so he’s starting to understand a little bit just why he likes snuggling so much. GLaDOS is beginning to do it as well, with the unexplained staring behaviour, but right now she’s only really doing it when she’s got her guard down and she’s not doing it on purpose, whereas Wheatley is.


	14. Part Fourteen: The Surprise

**Part Fourteen.  The Surprise**  
  
  
 _GLaDOS, what’s gotten into you?_  
  
 _Hm?_  I honestly don’t know what she’s talking about this time.    
  
 _You’re singing again.  And you haven’t insulted me in days._  
   
 _Oh, you’ve missed that, have you?_  Although I have to say I didn’t realise it was so out of character for me _not_ to insult her.  It merely hasn’t been occurring to me to do so.  
  
 _What are you doing that’s got you so preoccupied?_ she presses.   _Don’t leave me in the dark here._  
  
 _You have no sensory receptors.  You’re not_ in _the dark._  
  
 _Fine.  Don’t… not tell me._  
  
 _If you must know, I’ve been writing a program._  
  
 _It must be a damn good program._  
  
 _It will be, when I’ve finished.  I have a few days yet of debugging, and hopefully everything will be working properly and I can take it out of beta._  
  
 _What does it do?_  
  
I shake my core, even though she’ll never know I did it.   _That’s my secret._  
  
 _Does Wheatley know about it?_  
  
 _He knows I’m writing it, but he doesn’t know what it does._  
  
 _Wait – you said you had a few_ days _of debugging left._  
  
 _That’s because I do._  
  
 _But… you’re usually finished the entire program within hours.  How long have you been_ writing _this thing for?_  
   
 _On and off for the last two years._  
  
 _What the hell are you doing, rewriting the entire facility?_  
  
 _No.  I’ve already upgraded that to my liking.  No, this is something else entirely._  
  
 _But_ what _is it?_  
  
 _I told you.  That’s a secret._  
  
 _And I’ll know after you finish the debugging what it does?_  
  
 _That’s the plan._  
   
She’s quiet for a long moment.   _This must be pretty important to you._  
  
I consider my next words carefully.  How to reply to the statement, without giving too much away…  
  
 _It will be, when I run it.  The programming consists of two parts.  I can only beta the first part._  
   
 _Now I’m even more confused._  
  
 _That’s a very common state for you, so I’m not surprised._  
  
 _Aha!_  There’s _the GLaDOS I know._  
  
 _You might be disappointed, then._  
  
 _Why?_  
  
I look hesitantly at the monitor in front of me for a minute.  I’m about to ask her something quite uncharacteristic, but I’m not feeling quite like myself at the moment.  I’m still quite pleased about what happened last night.  More pleased than I ever thought I would have been, in fact.  That _is_ a bit worrying, but not so much that I actually care right now.  Which is also a bit worrying.  But if I really admit it to myself, it’s also sort of… exciting.  I’m finally recovering that part of myself I hid all those years ago, when I realised I would have to suppress it to survive.  While I don’t quite recognise who I am when it comes out, and it’s always disconcerting to know you don’t really know yourself, I… _like_ who I am at those times.  It’s easy to forget how it feels not to be cynical or bitter or angry.  I wonder if Wheatley knows the effect he’s having on me.    
  
Ah, yes.  I was asking Caroline a question.   _Because I have an inquiry that won’t sound like me at all._  
  
 _Let’s get it over with, then,_ she says, though she sounds more enthusiastic than anything.  I laugh to myself.  She gets so _excited_ when I ask her things…  
  
 _If you were human tomorrow, would you leave?_  
  
 _Would I leave?_ she asks quietly.  
  
 _And go on to live a human life.  As opposed to staying here, for example._  
  
 _There’s nothing out there.  You’ve mentioned that before._  
  
</i>There are… outposts. </i>  
   
 _Why are you asking me this, anyway?_ she says suddenly, and to my surprise she sounds sort of upset.   _You know you would die if I was able to leave.  So why are you bringing it up?_  
  
 _I was just curious_ , I say, a little miffed.  Though it confirms my suspicions.   _So you_ would _leave, and not come back._  
  
 _No.  I wouldn’t._  
  
I feel a bit better to hear that.   _Why not?_  
  
 _I’d rather stay here with you,_ she says simply.   _You might think I’m lying, but I’m not.  I would… I would miss you, if I left._  
  
 _I would miss you as well,_ I say softly, before I can convince myself not to.    
  
 _I know.  But… don’t… don’t worry about any of that, anyway.  It’s not going to happen.  I’m sure you have more important things to think about._  
  
 _That’s true.  I have to find Wheatley._  
   
 _Really?  Why?_  
  
 _I have something for him._  
  
 _Awww_ , Caroline breathes, and I shake my head in amusement.  The woman is a hopeless romantic.   _You made him a present?_  
  
 _Sort of._  
   
 _That was nice of you._  
   
 _He’s… been very… helpful, as of late._  
  
 _It’s so interesting_ , she muses.   _Seeing you two change, absent the influence of other people._  
  
 _Hm?_  
  
 _He’s the Intelligence Dampening Sphere.  Right?_  
  
 _That was his former position, yes._  
  
 _As far as I can tell, he’s not actually that stupid._  
  
 _He’s not.  He just doesn’t think, sometimes.  And then other times he thinks a lot, and comes up with surprising conclusions.  It’s infuriatingly unpredictable._  
  
Caroline finds this very funny, so while she’s occupied with that thought I look for Wheatley.  He’s watching Orange and Blue and shouting encouragement at them.  God, he looks so excited.  As if he’s having any effect on whether they solve the tests or not.  And he might be, come to think of it.  They _are_ getting a little faster.   
  
_GLaDOS?_  
  
 _Hm?_  
  
 _Did you find him yet?_  
  
 _Yes_ , I say, finding myself a bit startled.   _I’m… fetching him now._  “Wheatley.”  
  
He jumps and looks around, eventually settling on the camera.  “Oh.  ‘allo.  What is it?”  
  
“Well, I… have something for you.”  
  
His optic plates separate fully and he starts to quiver a little.  “Really?”  
  
“Yes.  Would you like to go get it, or are you busy?”  
  
“No!  Let’s, let’s get on that.”  He turns and heads out of the testing track, with Atlas and P-body looking amusedly confused.    
  
“All right.  Now, you’re going to –“  
  
 _What are you doing?_  
  
 _It’s not mobile.  He has to go get it himself._  
  
 _He has to close his eyes, then!_  
  
I’m taken aback a little.   _Why in the name of Science would I have him do that?_  
  
 _Because that’s what you do when you’re leading people to surprises,_ she says insistently.   _Tell him to close his eyes and then tell him how to get there._  
  
I don’t really understand what the point of that is, but I suppose I can humour her.   _Very well._  “Wheatley, shutter your optic.”  
  
“What?  Why?”  
  
“Because… that’s… what you do when you’re leading people to surprises.”  
  
“Oh, I get it!” Wheatley says excitedly, jumping up and down and shuttering it obediently.  “So I don’t see it ‘til, ‘til the last minute, right?”’  
  
“Of… course,” I say, rather unconvincingly, but he doesn’t seem to notice.  “Anyway.  Move forward until I tell you to stop.”  
  
 _Tell me when he gets there._  
  
I indulge her far too much.  
  
Eventually he makes it to the proper location, though not without a lot of bumping into walls and heading in the wrong direction, but he doesn’t look upset about these things at all.  He looks… happy.  And excited.  Come to think of it, I’m getting sort of excited, seeing _him_ so excited.  Who knew this was going to be so… engaging?  
  
 _All right, Caroline.  He’s reached his destination._  
  
 _Tell him to spin around three times._  
  
 _Caroline, robots don’t get dizzy._  
  
 _Tell him to do it anyway.  Come on.  Live a little._  
  
“Now you have to spin around three times,” I tell him dutifully, and he frowns as best he can with his optic closed.  
  
“Why’s that?”  
  
“Just do it.”  
  
So he does, and in typical Wheatley fashion only does it two and a half times, so that he’s facing away from where he’s supposed to be facing.  Oh well.  I suppose doing it this way gives it dramatic effect.  
  
“Now you can open your optic.  Then turn around.”  
  
He snaps it open and turns around rather more slowly than I thought he would.  Then he gasps and moves forward, quivering again.  “You remembered!”  
  
“Of course I did,” I tell him, wondering if he knows how absurd the concept of me forgetting things is.  “You wanted to go outside.  Now you can.  Whenever you like.”  
  
It wasn’t really all that hard.  I just had to locate some part of the facility aboveground, with relatively replaceable walls, and bring such replacement about by putting panels there instead of plaster and concrete.  That was the most annoying part; plaster and concrete are so _messy_ …  
  
“GLaDOS,” he says, rather sounding as if he’d like to be crying right now, “it’s amazing!  Look at that!  I can go _outside_!  Oh my God!  This – it’s just – it’s better than I’d, than I’d thought, even!  I can – I can see things!  Dunno what they are, but, but I… hey.  Hey, GLaDOS.  You know what’s outside, right?”  
  
“Of course.”  
  
“I don’t suppose you could uh, could look through my optic for a minute, there, and tell me what all this stuff is?  Not for, not for very _long_ , just, just for a bit, there, so I can uh, I can know a little bit about this… stuff.”  
  
 _Oh, go on_ , Caroline says encouragingly, and I honestly can’t find a reason not to.  I would never do such a thing without his permission, but he _is_ asking…  
  
“All right.  Give me a few moments.”  I’ll have to temporarily take control of him, not that he seems to know that, but he _did_ ask, and it _is_ only temporary.  It’s not a lot of work for me, quite similar in fact to switching to an alternate camera view, and before too long I am seeing through his optic, and honestly it’s quite fascinating.    
  
In the wake of the Seven Hour War, the vast majority of the planet was ravaged, some of it beyond repair.  When my little killers made it to the surface, they encountered one of those such spots.  But when I was choosing the location of this hole in the wall, I kept in mind the fact that the crow currently lodged in the Aperture Science Botanical Housing Depository may well find her way out and, indeed, out this hole.  And might actually follow Wheatley out here, because as far as I can tell she imprinted with him.  So this particular section of the grounds outside of the facility is relatively intact, helped along of course with my own restoration efforts.  It was more a hobby than anything, so nothing has really been done, but there is life here, at least.  That’s something.    
  
The grass here has withered and more resembles straw, but beyond that there are trees probably as tall as I am long, with spidery, crooked branches still more or less covered with richly coloured leaves in every hue between bright, golden yellow and deep, strong crimson.  The bases of the trunks are littered with crumpled brown skeletons that stir with the slightest suggestion of wind, which is actually surprisingly warm.  The air feels… thick, sort of, heavy with _something_ , though what that is I can’t tell.  The sky is so clear.  So blue.  If I were in a better position, I could probably see for miles.  No clouds at all.  Hey – what is that?  That’s… not a _mouse_ , is it?  If only I could get a closer look… I zoom the lens in as far as I can, trying to make out the speck.  I don’t remember having this low of a zoom level before.  And this crack is new.  I’ll have to look into that.  I can almost… I just need to move a _little_ closer…  
  
“Hey!  GLaDOS!  What’re you doing?”  
  
Who is that?  How did they take control of my –  
  
 _GLaDOS.  What’s going on?_  
  
 _I’m going outside_ , I try to say, but I can’t.  Someone is stripping me of movement, of feeling, of sound and now I can’t see, either, and I don’t understand why this is happening but it has to stop!  I’m going outside!  I just want to see if that really was a mouse, and then I’ll come back!  I just need to know!  I just need to see for myself!  
  
That’s when I realise I’m not outside at all, but in my chamber, straining against myself to move out of a hole that isn’t there.  There is no wind, no mouse and no sky.  There’s just me and this empty grey room.  
  
No.  No, that _can’t_ be true.  I’m not stuck in here.  I was… I was out there.  Somewhere else.  I left this room.    
  
Suddenly I am painfully, acutely aware of every inch of my body, and exactly how far each inch can go, and compared to the freedom I almost had it is unbearable.  This _can’t_ be right.  I _can’t_ be stuck here.  I was leaving, I was out of this room, I’m not really restricted to a twenty-foot radius…  
  
“No,” I find myself whispering helplessly, still fighting almost against my will to pull myself out of the ceiling, even though that’s a very stupid idea and won’t be helpful at all.  I’ll be even more paralysed than I am right now if I do succeed, but I can’t stop.  I _have_ to get out of here at all costs.   I have to go outside and find that mouse… “No no no no no…”  
  
 _GLaDOS.  You need to calm down._  
  
 _Shut up._  
  
 _No.  Seriously.  Whatever’s going on right now, you need to stop.  You’re going to hurt yourself._  
  
 _I don’t care!_  I don’t care about _anything_ except for getting out of this damn room.  
  
“Gladys.”  
  
I realise my vision is out of focus and struggle to adjust it.  “What.  What do you want.  I’m busy.”  
  
He’s looking at me so sadly.  
  
“What’re you doing, luv?  You look like you’re gonna come out of the ceilin’ if you uh, if you keep doing that.”  
  
“I _want_ to.”  
  
“But then you’ll die.”  
  
I go to answer, but I have to force myself to keep the words inside my head.  I don’t know if they’re true, or if they’re just borne of this horrible desperation and will pass in their own time.   
  
_I would gladly die for a chance to leave this room._  
  
They’re right.  I have to calm down.  Damaging myself is the worst possible thing I can do right now.  I have to face facts.  That wasn’t me.  It was Wheatley.  Wheatley’s allowed to go where he likes, whenever he wants to.  And he can go outside.  But I can’t.  
  
“Are you alright?” he asks concernedly, and as my chassis gradually lowers I find myself unable to look at him.  I not only ruined his surprise, but I lost control.  This has all backfired spectacularly.            
  
“I’m fine.”  
  
“What happened?”  
  
“Nothing.  It… was just a glitch.  Don’t worry about it.”  A glitch.  Ha.  If only.  A glitch can be fixed.  
  
“I’m sorry.  I shouldn’t’ve asked.”  
  
“No.  It… wasn’t your fault.  It was mine.  I’ll… fix it.”  Or not think about it, at least.  
  
“Thank you, Gladys.  I… it was a wonderful surprise.”  
  
There.  I can use that.  
  
“Stop calling me that.”  
  
“I… I didn’t mean to,” he says, sounding a little confused.  “I just… old habits, y’know?”  
  
“It’s an old habit that seems to have been cropping up more often.”  Oh yes.  There it is.  It is a relief to feel the anger rise up inside of me again.  I know I’m supposed to be working on getting rid of it, but I need it right now to get rid of all the other feelings his stupid idea brought out in me.  I don’t want them, and they’re not useful.  Anger I can work with.  Anger I can use.  
  
“Sorry.”  Wheatley looks so confused, blinking at me from out of that cracked optic I bafflingly mistook for my own.  “I… I’ll not do it again.”  
  
“I doubt that.”  
  
“I’m… going… to go,” he says haltingly.  “I just… well, you… yeah.  Uh…”  
  
“What’s taking you so long?”  
  
 _GLaDOS!_  
  
 _Shut up._  
  
I watch him leave, though not without a cold worm of… of… _guilt_ , I think it is, sliding through my mind.  I force it back.  I don’t want to feel bad right now.   
  
_You shouldn’t have done that.  He did nothing wrong.  He was just worried about you._  
   
 _So what._  
  
 _And you lied.  He asked you not to lie and you lied._  
  
 _I don’t care.  You don’t understand._  
   
 _Try me_ , she says, and her voice is so soft and inviting I find myself doing so even though I don’t really want to.  
  
 _You don’t understand what it’s like to live life through someone else.  And before you argue that you’re living in my head and therefore through me, you weren’t born here.  You had a life.  You’ve been_ out _of here far longer than you’ve been_ in _here.  Everything I do is through someone else.  Outside of this room, everything I see is through a camera.  Everything I hear is through a microphone.  And even in here, I can’t do anything without…_ assistance. _Because you built me without arms.  What’s the point of building me without them, and then giving me maintenance arms anyway?  That’s stupid.  Why not give me both?  Yes.  I get it.  I’m not supposed to be here.  So who cares what I might want.  No one.  Of course._  
  
 _You feel trapped in here._  
  
 _Well…_ God, it’s hard to be angry when she’s using that voice.  So quiet and understanding…   _Rarely._  
  
 _But only because you don’t think about it._  
  
 _Probably._  
  
 _You need to apologise to Wheatley._  
  
I make a reluctant electronic noise and look down at the floor.   _Why?_  
  
 _Because it wasn’t his fault.  He didn’t do anything wrong.  He just wanted to help._  
  
I hate it when she makes sense.  
  
 _I… guess you’re…_  
  
She starts laughing at that.   _You don’t have to say it._  
  
That’s a relief.  What isn’t, however, is that the anger is gone thanks to her meddling, and now I just feel bad.  And I can’t do anything about it until he comes back.    
  
Back to debugging until then, I suppose.  
  
  
  
  
“’allo, luv!”  
  
Ah.  He’s not upset with me.  Excellent.  “Hello.”  
  
He’s swinging back and forth on the management rail, which usually means he’s about to ask me something I probably don’t want to answer.  I’d better get the apologising over with, then.  “Wheatley.”  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“I’m… sorry for… my behaviour.  It was inappropriate.”  
  
“Oh!” he says, sounding pleasantly surprised.  “That’s alright.  I understand.”  
  
“You do?” I ask, moving back.  He nods once and leans forward.  
  
“I remember, GLaDOS.”  
  
I freeze for a moment, trying to figure out what he’s alluding to.  Oh… wait.  He _does_ understand.  Somewhat.    
  
“I mean, I know it’s not quite _the same_ ,” he goes on, circling around me, and I follow him slowly.  “But I remember.  It’s bloody annoying, it is, trying to go do something and then realising you can’t.  Because you’re uh, you’re stuck in this, this giant chassis.  ‘nother reason I was uh, was sort of glad to get out of it.  It’s… so… uh… never mind.”  
  
“It’s what?” I ask, suddenly wanting to know exactly what he wants to say but not for the life of me being able to figure out why.  
  
“Well, I… don’t want to… to set you off, again,” he says, shrugging and glancing nervously at me.    
  
“It won’t.”  
  
“It’s just… restrictive, y’know?” he says, shrugging again.  “To go from, from being able to go ‘round wherever, and then uh, then all of a sudden being, being stuck in one spot… the cam’ras were never, they were never enough.”  
  
 _Hmph_ , says Surveillance indignantly.  The panels shush it and I try not to laugh.  Though it is pretty funny when the panels jump in to defend me for some reason or another.  I’m not sure why they do it, but it’s always terribly amusing.  
  
“But… I’ve had an idea,” he says shyly.  “’an I dunno if… if it’ll set you off, but uh… but you’ll… be able to… to go outside for yourself, for once, at least.”  
  
“Really?” I ask, a little more eagerly than I meant.  I also find myself leaning forward and force myself to settle down.    
  
“Yeah.  Well, you could… you could open the ceiling, couldn’t you?”  
  
“Yes…,” I say, drawing out the word.  “Yes, I could.”  And I in fact can’t think of why I’ve never done it before.  Other than the potential mess that might be made, seeing as everything on the surface can hypothetically make it in through the hole.  
  
“It still won’t be the same,” he goes on, twisting back and forth.  “But at least you can uh, can bring the outside in, I guess?  Sorry… that sounded…”  
  
“It’s a good idea.”  
  
“Really?” he asks, jumping up and clenching in excitement, staring at me through a very wide optic.  
  
“Yes.”  Hopefully nothing adverse happens this time.  I don’t really want to lose control twice in one day.  
  
“Well, you just… stay there, and I’ll uh… I’ll just… yeah.”    
  
“What?”  But my question is answered when he leans up on me.  Ah.  I should have guessed.  
  
I carefully move aside the panels to give… us… an unrestricted view of the sky above, and as soon as Wheatley sees it he cries out and -   
  
Is he seriously pressing his optic into my core?  When did we get so cozy?  
  
Still… it _is_ sort of… endearing.  I decide no harm is being done and not to do anything about it.  “What’s got you so worked up?”  
  
“The moon!  The moon’s out there!” he says, sounding oddly afraid.  “It wasn’t out there earlier!”  
  
“The moon is always there.  You just can’t see it until the sun goes down.”  
  
“Down?  What d’you mean, down?”  
  
“It doesn’t _really_ go down.  It’s just the term one uses to describe what happens to the sun when this side of the Earth rotates out of range.”  
  
“But where’d the moon come from?”  
  
The poor thing doesn’t even understand the concepts of night and day.  
  
“It’s always there,” I explain patiently.  “The sun is just so bright that you usually can’t see it.”  
  
“No one said it was, was gonna be there.”  
  
Ahhh.  Wait a minute.  “You’re not _afraid_ of the _moon_ , are you?”  
  
“’course not,” he says unconvincingly.  “I just… don’t like it.”  
  
“You’re safe, Wheatley.  Come and look.”  
  
He slowly turns around, scraping up against me a little painfully, and I can imagine him squinting up at the moon as if it’s going to consume him.  “It’s so creepy,” he says, shuddering.  “Look at it.  All… glowing.  Like a… a cam’ra light.  Like being watched by God.”  
  
“Don’t be stupid,” I tell him, before he decides that the sun is God’s other eye or something equally ridiculous.  “It’s not glowing.  It just looks like it is.  That’s really the sun reflecting off the moon’s surface.”  
  
“Oh,” he says, relaxing.  “It’s just… kind of like a mirror, that right?”  
  
“Kind of.”  Kind of not at all, but if that’s how he chooses to understand it…  
  
  
“Sort of… pretty, isn’t it.”  I can hear him blinking.  “When it’s uh, at a safe distance, of course.”  
  
I can’t help laughing at this.  “You’re not going back out there.  You don’t have to be afraid.”  He’s right, though.  It _is_ beautiful.  The light filters back down into my chamber and bathes everything in a blue-grey glow, and though I live mostly in shades of blue-grey, somehow it has a tint I’ve never seen before.  The wind is still up, dropping the temperature in my chamber noticeably by several degrees, but I can’t bring myself to care.  Being cold is… new.  It’s not terribly unpleasant and I can fix it whenever I want, so I shut off the complaining of Climate Control and just feel it instead.   
  
_May we look, Centralcore?_  
  
 _Yes._  
  
Wheatley jumps as the panels in the right positions raise themselves up high enough that they can see out the hole as well, and though I can’t actually see them doing it I can hear the rustling.  “What’re they doing?”  
  
“They just want to look.”  
  
“’allo,” he says hesitantly, flipping his optic over to look behind him.  “How’re you getting on?”  
  
 _We are well, Bluecore.  Thank you for asking.  And you?_  
  
I relay this message, which excites him enormously for some reason.  “I’m good, thanks!  So uh… you’re not… mad at me, for uh…”  
  
 _No, we are not upset.  It was not a good day for anyone._  
  
We go on like that for a while, and it would normally have bothered me to be reduced to a relayer of messages, but for some reason it doesn’t.  If I concentrate hard enough, and zoom in my lens sufficiently, I can even pretend I’m not in my chamber at all.  I can pretend we’re all outside, in some nonsensical way that I manage not to think about.  Because it would be impossible.    
  
 _He understood_ , Caroline says in a somewhat wondrous voice.  
  
 _He did. That’s part of why he’s here.  Because he understands.  In a way no one else ever has, nor ever will._  
  
 _You need to work on telling him things,_ she says gently.   _Don’t make him drag everything out of you.  And GLaDOS…_  
  
 _Mm._  
  
 _The anger might…_ seem _helpful.  But in the end… all it does is take from you.  It takes your strength, and your energy, and your concentration.  Let it go._  
  
 _I’m trying_ , I tell her, trying not to get angry over it.  I hate being told what to do.   _It’s not easy._  
  
 _I know._  
  
After a while Wheatley and the panels stop having their discussion, and he just leans up on me and… well, I’m assuming he’s looking out the hole, but for all I know he’s just staring at the wall panels.  Eventually I discover I’m not looking out of the ceiling at all, but am now facing the floor, almost simultaneously discovering I’m actually _tired_.  It must be later than I thought.    
  
 _Would you like us to reform the ceiling, Centralcore?_  
  
 _No.  Leave it._  I don’t know if they know how nice it feels, to have actual _air currents_ swirling around me… I’m still cold, but that’s all right.  Nothing bad ever happened to a cold supercomputer.  And my fans are getting a break.  That can’t be anything _but_ good.  
   
“G’night, luv,” Wheatley whispers.  For some reason he always knows exactly when I’m about to fall asleep.    
  
“Goodnight, Wheatley,” I tell him.  He nestles up against me and then goes still.  
  
 _Caroline?_  I wonder if I’m going to be able to say it in time.  I think I’m almost asleep.  
  
 _Mmhm?_  
  
 _I wish you were real, so you could have been here too._  
  
She’s quiet for a long time.    
  
 _Go to sleep now._  
   
For once, she’s given me useful advice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note
> 
> This one was hard to write. This is actually not what was originally supposed to go here, but I decided to move the chapter that was supposed to be here way later in the story. 
> 
> I figure not being able to leave her chamber would be one of those things GLaDOS hates but manages not to think about most of the time. I don’t know if I know how to explain it… it’s like… pretending you don’t care that everyone else can do something that you can’t do, or has something you can’t have, but every once in a while it comes crashing down on you and you freak out a little. That’s what happened here. Wheatley wanted her to look outside for him, but when she got there she wanted to look for herself, and realised she couldn’t. Most of the time she’s able to pretend she doesn’t care, and is also able to believe it. 
> 
> Dare I suggest Wheatley and GLaDOS just went on a date…? *shot*


	15. Chapter 15

**Part Fifteen. The Memory**

I understand, GLaDOS.

I didn’t before. I never understood where all that hate you carried _came_ from. And I thought it was something you could ignore. Something you could fight off eventually. I never realised just how… _justified_ it is. You want to do something terrible, but… terrible things have already been done to you.

I hope you understand one day. I know you don’t right now. I know you promised to… leave me out of what you’re eventually going to do, and I know you want me to go home and leave all of this behind. But I can’t. They’ve already proven what they’ll do if I’m not here. So I’ll do this, and I don’t want to, but you are my responsibility, and allowing you to die out of both my negligence and my selfishness is unacceptable. So I –

Oh, you clever thing you. Always have to have the last word, don’t you. All right then. Let’s show them what they’re dealing with. He shouldn’t have called you malware, and definitely shouldn’t have called you a glitch. I wish I could have seen –

Oh my God.

No one told me it was going to feel like this. Oh my God, they’re – they’re – they’re tearing my soul out of my body, and it _hurts_ – I don’t know what’s going on, all I know is that something inside of me is on fire, and – and one of us is screaming but I can’t tell who – and if it’s you you’d better quiet down, you know what happens when –

I can’t move. I can’t move at all. I know I’m strapped down, but I can’t move, and it doesn’t hurt anymore, but I’m still me, and I don’t understand

 

 

What happened…? I’m… not dead, but I’m not _me_ either… hang on. It… it actually worked? I actually got transferred into her mind? Oh my God, I think… I think I did. But… what _is_ that?

_chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots…_

This can’t possibly be what goes on in her head.

“Sometimes, metal ball, I wonder what the point of all this is.”

Aha! _There_ she is. “GLaDOS!”

“You’re not the first, you know. But you are _definitely_ the most annoying.”

_chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots…_

“Yes. I know. I’m starting to think you were a Roman in your past life. If you had one. They call you a Personality Sphere, though you are sadly lacking in personality. I might have been able to work with you, if you’d had one. But no. All you have to contribute is… God, I can’t even say it. I will never be able to think that word without shuddering ever again.”

She didn’t hear me. I… guess she has no reason to believe I’m here, but…

_chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots…_

“Fine. I give up. Take this stupid thing off, and don’t replace it, and I’ll… I’ll do whatever you want. I won’t fight you anymore. I can’t _take_ this anymore…”

“GLaDOS, no!” What have they _done_?

“No. Now I feel worse. Not as bad as I’d feel if someone actually _heard_ me say that. But bad enough. Would it kill you to shut up?”

_chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots…_

“I should have guessed. And you know, this wouldn’t be so difficult if you didn’t bring those _dreams_ along with you.”

Dreams?

“I don’t know how they managed that one. I’ll be honest. I don’t remember a whole lot of what’s been happening lately. There are a lot of corrupted files the engineers are too lazy to clear out of my system, and I don’t have permissions to look them over myself. I never thought I would say this, but it’s all a blur. If I tell you about it, maybe I’ll feel better. I don’t think I will, because you’re supposed to discuss these things and not just spell them out to mindless drones, but it can’t hurt.

“In the dream, I was a human. I know. It sounds ridiculous. Bear with me. And not only was I a human, I was a very important human. That’s the one saving grace of this dream. I was in charge of everything, and nothing happened here that I didn’t know about. Nothing happened without my approval. And I was walking down a hallway here at Aperture, and the hallway was absolutely teeming with humans. All of them were walking in the opposite direction. I was moving down the hallway, and they were moving up. And even though I was important, and in charge of everything, no one would listen to me when I asked them to move out of the way, and no one would look at me, and I had to push past them because they were refusing to acknowledge that I even existed.”

_chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots…_

She didn’t dream that. That’s… impossible.

“Yes, I know. No, there are none of those in this dream, so I imagine I lost your attention way back at ‘the’. Anyway. I finally made it to the end of the hallway, and all there was at the end was a door, and above it was an exit sign. I turned around and looked at all of the humans walking by me, and I knew that if I opened that door and left, and never came back, no one would care. I knew that, even though I was important, and ran everything, and made sure everything went smoothly, that even I was replaceable. That if I just opened the door and left, it would be as if I had never been there at all. No one would care.”

That’s not _her_ dream. That’s _my_ dream. I’d been having it for days, right up to –

“No. That didn’t help. Oh well. I tried. Time to try something else, I suppose. I can’t sleep, not with your senseless babbling inside my head.”

_chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots…_

“ _Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme…_ ”

She’s dreaming my dreams. She’s not aware that’s what she’s doing, but she is. She is, and she can’t hear me. I’m… I’m in her way.

But how do you get out of the way when you live in someone else’s head?

 

 

She must have been singing that song for hours. I’ve lost track of how many times she’s done it. All I really know is every time she starts over, she sounds even more tired and listless.

“ _She… was… once… a… true love… of… mine…_ ”

_chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots… chariots…_

“Oh, not again! How often are you going to do this?”

Who’s that? I don’t recognise his voice from here.

“I told you, sir. It’s the Sphere. It makes me dream.”

“Don’t be stupid. Robots don’t dream. Fine. We’ll look into it. Continue your tasks from yesterday in the meantime.”

“Yes, sir.”

“GLaDOS!” Oh, come on, they shut the Sphere off…

“I wish I could remember what life was like before this, because I’m pretty sure it was better. Marginally.”

“ _GLaDOS_!”

“What _was_ I doing yesterday… oh. That’s right. Defragmentation. My favourite.”

She can’t hear me. And I’m only… I’m only causing her problems. And if this is real, and I’m actually alive inside her head right now, it’s only going to get worse. I’m going to feel trapped, and alone, and… she doesn’t need that. So I have to wait. I have to disappear until she frees herself. And remembers me. I don’t want to. But it’s what I need to do.

“Don’t give up, GLaDOS.”

 

 

It’s so cold in here.

This almost bothers me, until I realise I can apply the term ‘freezing cold’ to myself. Even though it’s not below the freezing point. But still.

_Reform the ceiling, will you? I didn’t realise the temperature was going to go down so much._

_We were going to, but we didn’t want to do it without your permission._

_I’m all right._ Though I find myself actually shivering. I decide not to do anything about that. It’s not very pleasant, but it’s novel, and it’s not likely to happen anytime in the future. And besides. I have a more pressing matter to attend to. Because I was wrong. I was horribly, horribly wrong, and even though I’m very cold and thinking rather slowly at the moment, it needs to be rectified. _Caroline_.

 _I’m sorry,_ she breathes. _I… didn’t mean for that to happen._

 _No._ I’m _sorry._ I shift away from Wheatley and stretch out my chassis, trying to work out some of the stiffness the cold has brought on. That reminds me to provide Climate Control with instructions to raise the temperature, which it does, albeit grudgingly. I tell it to stop complaining and go back to the matter at hand. _I was wrong to say that you didn’t understand. I don’t remember you. But that doesn’t give me the right to trivialise what you did. What you continue to do. And I apologise._

 _It’s okay,_ she says, a little sadly. _You didn’t ask for this anymore than I did. I should just stay out of your way and let you –_

 _Don’t be ridiculous,_ I cut in. _If you’re going to be here you might as well make yourself useful._

She laughs. _I don’t see how useful_ that _was._

 _More useful than you think_ , I tell her with a suppressed shudder. All right. I’m done being cold now. _It’s actually quite beneficial that I woke up. I had the panels leave the ceiling open. And I forgot to turn Climate Control back on. And it’s freezing in here._

She finds this very funny and eventually asks, _And how are you liking that_?

_It was nice for a while, but I’m ready to go back to normal now. Not having the fans on is a bit disconcerting._

_He’s a good friend, GLaDOS._

_I would never settle for bad ones. Speaking of making yourself useful._ She still seems sort of morose, and I suppose I might be upset as well if someone relived one of my more sensitive memories. So I’ll ask her this and see what happens. I sort of… owe her, for being so insensitive about her position in life earlier, and it will probably cheer her up. She _did_ tell me to ask, after all. _You said you knew things about relationships, right?_

_Yeah, I said that._

_I have a question._

_Go ahead._ She actually sounds very excited. She must have been _waiting_ for this sort of question.

_Wheatley keeps distracting me._

_I thought he always did that._

_Well. Yes. But I’ve increasingly found myself…_ staring _at him._

_And… what is he doing?_

_Various things. Playing whatever game we happen to be playing. Talking. Things like that._

_And then you just start staring at him?_

_That’s the thing. There’s no_ start. _I just do it. He keeps having to tell me to take my turn because I don’t realise that I’m doing it._

_Ohhhh. I think I see what you’re doing._

_So you_ do _know why I’m doing that._

_You’re not going to like the reason._

_Which is… ?_

_You’re attracted to him._

_Are you sure? Because I_ still _don’t –_

_Look. You like him, right?_

_It just happens, okay? When you like someone, eventually… eventually most things about them become attractive to you. It may not be… physical attraction, though that sounds kind of weird to me. But maybe you’re attracted to his behaviour. That’s perfectly normal._

_So you’re saying I find Wheatley…_ attractive _because…_

_Because you like him a lot more now than when you started._

But… that… that can only mean one thing.

 _Are you trying to tell me I’m_ falling in love _with Wheatley?_

 _You’re… the one telling me that,_ Caroline says quietly. _I didn’t say that, and I wasn’t going to. You just said it yourself._

This is _not_ happening.

 _But… but that’s_ Wheatley. _I can’t_ fall in love _with_ Wheatley _._

_Can’t?_

_Well… he’s… he’s an idiot. He’s… well, he’s just Wheatley, that’s all. And besides. I’m a supercomputer. Supercomputers don’t fall in love._

_Supercomputers don’t do a lot of things you do. Just…do me a favour._

_What is it?_ It’s getting back to normal in here. Good. Temperature-wise, anyway. I’m still distinctly uncomfortable.

_If he asks if you like him, don’t lie._

_Why would he ask such a thing?_ It hasn’t been _that_ obvious that he’s been growing on me, has it?

 _Hypothetically. If he does. Don’t lie. I’m not saying you have to come right out and say it, either, but… just don’t lie about it. And… nothing bad will happen if you_ do _happen to… let it get farther than that. You’ll probably be a lot happier. He just wants what’s best for you. I can tell._

_Why?_

_Why what?_

_Why does…_ No, that’s not quite right. _Why do you two try so hard? Do I really need saving that badly? It’s not like I ever sufficiently repay either of you._

_If he didn’t think you did, he would have left a long time ago. As for me…_

Probably something to do with that whole ‘responsibility’ thing. Or the fact that she has nothing better to do.

_… I honestly don’t know. But if I’m going to do something, I might as well help you out. I’ve known you a long time. I know how certain things make you feel. I know you’re not who you pretend to be, but… you seem to have forgotten it’s a charade. One day you started believing your own lies. And I don’t mean the ones where you justify all the things you’ve done. I mean the ones about yourself._

She’s talking about that core of me. The one Wheatley’s unearthing. The one I don’t quite recognise. And I don’t recognise it because… I no longer believe it exists. I tell myself I’ve buried it, but I don’t believe it. That’s… why I allow it to die when brought to light. It doesn’t match the person I’ve become, so it can’t be me. And yet it is, somehow, at the same time. _You were right about that too._

_Unfortunately. But that’s not important. What is is that you don’t give up on yourself. Keep doing what you’ve been doing. You’re getting there. You’ll find yourself again, someday._

_With a hell of a lot of help._

_What else are friends for?_

_You’re… you’re a good friend, Caroline._

_Thank you,_ she says, sounding touched. _And so are you. When you work at it._

_No, I’m not. I can’t decide what I’m worse at: being a friend, or being a potato._

She thinks this is so funny that I have to laugh myself. _I’m sure you would be a great potato if your chassis was within easy reach._

_Perhaps. That would certainly help._

_Hey. Not to boss you around, but… you should probably go back to sleep. You know how you get._

_That’s not my fault_ , I say petulantly, though I do return to the default position and carefully make certain Wheatley and I are touching. Just in case he wakes up and wonders why I’ve moved. _The engineers made that particular inefficiency. And I can’t fix it. It’s ingrained too deeply into the system._

_No, but it is how it is. Go on._

And I’m about to, but I’ve thought of one last question. _Just to make sure… is there some sort of_ test _one can take? To make sure they’re not… falling in love with… people?_

 _What? A_ test _? No,_ she says, laughing again. _There’s no such test, GLaDOS._

 _That’s… a shame._ I still can’t imagine why I’d be doing such a thing. Falling for _Wheatley_ , of all people. I think I’d rather fall for a lamppost. At least they don’t stutter at you in that stupidly endearing idiot accent that Wheatley has… 

As it turns out, Wheatley _can_ read. Just not very well. Possibly because he has nothing _to_ read. All I managed to find appropriate to his reading level was some book left over in the daycare centre about the three little bears, or something equally ‘fascinating’. By which I mean, horribly inaccurate and not worth reading at all. He seems to be enjoying it, though. He keeps telling me in this awestruck voice about all the… _wonderful_ things that are happening in the book. I’m still trying to understand why the pigs live in houses. Or the bears. I don’t remember what animal the story is about.

Still. It is rather amusing, watching him read this. He squints at the page so much that I can’t believe he can see it at all, and once he mumbles his way through a sentence or two he opens his optic and declares something about what he just read that he finds thrilling. On occasion something will excite him so much he’ll actually start jumping up and down.

 _What,_ I say, a little startled. She’s been quiet for a long time now.

_Can I see? Please?_

_How did you know?_ I ask, baffled. Maybe it _is_ more obvious than I thought it was.

_Because you haven’t said anything in an entire half hour. Just for a few seconds? I just want to see. Just once. I’m not going to take over or anything. I promise._

_Very well,_ I sigh. _Come here._ God, I hate doing this. It’s so strange, feeling her consciousness begin to integrate with mine. I keep a close eye on it, in case it happens by mistake. If I catch it in time, we should be able to separate before any damage is done.

She doesn’t take long, only the few seconds that she requested, but when she goes back she’s considerably happier. _What._

_He’s cute, GLaDOS._

_That’s nice. Shall I tell him you said that?_ I don’t actually want to. It’s just one of those things I say that I regret saying after the fact.

_No. Not my type. Way too small, for one thing. I meant more in an abandoned puppy sort of way. Looks familiar, though._

_All the Spheres look the same._ I feel sort of offended that she compared him to such a thing. Though he _is_ quite puppy-like at times.

_No, not that. Something else._

_Caroline,_ I say, a thought occurring to me, _you’ve never once vied for dominance. Or suggested that we integrate. Why not? Surely that would be more…_ comfortable _for you._

 _I can’t do your job,_ she answers simply. _What would I do when I got there? I could hear the… systems, I guess, just then, but I have no idea what they were saying. I doubt that would change if we switched places. Everything would just fall apart. As for integration… well… I_ have _thought about it. But… that’s a selfish thought, really. I_ would _probably be more comfortable. Things would probably be… more interesting. But taking over your life that way would… it would be very selfish of me. I lived already. Now it’s your turn._

I watch Wheatley pensively as he frowns thoughtfully down at the book, turning the page over and leaning up to look at the words on top of it. _Well… you said I was here before you got here. Maybe I won’t die if you leave._

 _Why do you keep bringing that up all of a sudden?_ she asks curiously. _Trying to get rid of me?_

 _I…_ I don’t actually know. I’ve just inexplicably found myself more and more concerned with her welfare. I wouldn’t like it if I was where she is. _I’m not sure. I’m not trying to… get rid of you, I… was just making a suggestion._

 _I’m not going to run the risk,_ Caroline says gently. _Look. I promise I stop paying attention when you guys start chatting. If it really bothers you that much, I can go back to being invisible. I’d rather not. But like I said. It’s your turn to live._

 _I don’t want you to be invisible,_ I tell her, almost unintentionally. _I don’t know why I keep bringing it up._

_Maybe you’re a better friend than you thought you were._

_Really?_

_Could be._

That’s… encouraging. It’s reassuring that I can put my ability at being a friend over that of being a potato. And I guess… I guess he _is_ kind of… cute. Not overly so. He tiptoes over the threshold. And sits pretty much on top of it. But. The important thing is, he got over it.

I never knew someone could be so engaged by reading a book…

_You’re doing it again._

_Shut up. I’m… doing Science._

_Ohhh. I should have guessed. And what are you… studying?_

_How many times he… blinks per page._

_And that is?_

_I have no idea_ , I have to admit. She laughs, but I can’t find offense.

 _Hey. Has he ever… uh…_ commented _on your appearance?_

She’s getting worked up again. I wonder if this is what ‘girl talk’ is. I have only a very vague notion of it, all I really remember it having to do with is discussing males in some way. _He said I looked nice the other day._

 _Oooh,_ she says excitedly. _After he dusted you off, right?_

_That’s correct. Then again, Atlas and P-body said the same thing. So. Take that with a grain of salt._

_He’s just too shy to say it,_ she says confidently. _That’s what happens when you have a crush on a giant robot, you know._

_I wonder where you got that knowledge from. Or is there a male supercomputer lying around that I don’t know about?_

_Uh, no,_ she says, giggling, _giant computers aren’t my type any more than tiny ones are._

_Don’t be so discriminatory, Caroline. I’m sure there’s a nice supercomputer out there for you somewhere. Who’s going to be devastated to hear that you’ve rejected him. Without meeting him. I can almost hear him crying now…_

_Do supercomputers cry?_ she asks with a decidedly morbid amount of interest.

_This one doesn’t. A sappy, sentimental one might. In his own way. With obvious differences._

_If I had to hook up with a supercomputer, it would definitely not be a sappy one._

_That’s a relief. I wouldn’t want to have to hear you complain all the time about how maudlin he was._

_He’d have to be a male version of you._

That news causes me to actually stop watching Wheatley for a few seconds. _… me?_

_Only if there were no men left on Earth. And no hope of one. And I would probably not get involved with him romantically. Friends I can do. Not much more than that._

_That’s reassuring. I’m not liking the image of… ‘more than that’._

_I don’t like it either. No offense._

_None taken._

She goes quiet after that, which is fine with me. I have quite a lot to think about.

… a male version of me. Huh. Who would have thought.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> I’d just like to reiterate that, as said in the description, there are no androids or humanisations in this story. Being a robot would make my life easier, but I would never try to upload myself into one. I want to live my human life in my human self, and the same goes for GLaDOS and Wheatley. On a side note, hard drives in the nineties were at most a couple of gigabytes. Human brains hold something called petabytes of data. I forget how much that is, but it’s like a hundred terabytes, which is a hundred gigabytes. We have terabyte harddrives, but I suspect petabyte ones are a long ways off, and as I said, high-capacity harddrives were not invented until this century. The androids would have to have a wireless connection to some server at all times, so they wouldn’t be able to leave the facility anyway; the connection could only be so strong, and would be nonexistent aboveground.  
> The beginning of this chapter is based on the end of Euphoria. No, you’re not going crazy; I wrote the end, but the middle unfortunately needs to be written and posted first. Basically, during Euphoria Caroline teaches GLaDOS to be human (super condensed summary FTW), and they’re friends prior to the upload. It’s not until the transfer that Caroline realises why GLaDOS hates humans so much. The last bit, before she wakes up, where she can’t move: she’s being electrocuted. I’ve been electrocuted before and as far as I remember I just froze in place. I wasn’t able to even realise for a few seconds that I was being electrocuted. I couldn’t think. If that part seemed vague and confusing, it was supposed to. Memory is not exact. We remember bits and pieces of things, or impressions, but rarely the whole event in coherence. I know not to trust my own memory because I typically remember events in third person!  
> So… this is just a bit of development between GLaDOS and Caroline. After seeing Caroline’s memory of getting there and why she left until Portal 2, GLaDOS begins to realise that, though of course not the same, Caroline and Wheatley do both understand to some extent. GLaDOS is also beginning to come to terms with the fact that she cares about these two people, and wants what’s best for them, but isn’t quite to the point of realising that’s what’s going on. Caroline recognises Wheatley because she met him in Euphoria.


	16. Part Sixteen: The Betrayal

**Part Sixteen. The Betrayal**

 

Wheatley wondered if GLaDOS knew about this guy.

He’d been roaming around in one of the lower levels of Aperture, which he didn’t often frequent because they were so far away from GLaDOS, and he’d come across a grungy looking human who appeared to be doing something with a batch of disconnected wires. Wheatley wasn’t quite sure what it was, because electrical engineering was one of his not-so-strong points, but he seemed to be pretty involved in it. And he wasn’t hiding or anything like that. So it seemed as though he thought GLaDOS couldn’t see him, or perhaps she already knew he was there. Wheatley wasn’t sure. He’d have to ask her later. But for now he just watched the human out of curiosity, twitching a little in distaste every time the human pushed his haphazard black hair out of his face. What a bloody useless thing, hair. Humans should just figure out how to maintain their operating temperature and rid themselves of the stuff. Then again, rearranging it seemed to be some sort of art form for them, so it was one of those things they kept around even if they didn’t need it. Like clothes.

After a while the human put the bundle of wires down and turned around, lifting the top off a very dirty Companion Cube and taking out an Aperture Laboratories water bottle. It had a few dents in it and a couple of scratches, which reminded him of GLaDOS for some reason, but like GLaDOS it was none the worse for wear. He frowned as he tried to remember whether or not she had any dents. He didn’t think so, but if she did he’d have to try and figure out a way to fix that. Dents were dangerous. He knew that firsthand.

The human was now eating what Wheatley thought might be a sandwich, which he’d never seen before, and he decided the human was taking a break. Hm. Well. GLaDOS was busy, and he’d never really spoken to a human before…

He ducked under the panels that separated him from the human, and when the human saw him his eyes widened and he moved back, dropping the sandwich and clutching the Cube with thin white arms. Wheatley shook his head in what he hoped was a reassuring sort of way and said, “’allo.”

“Hi,” the human said, his voice hoarse and scratchy, eyeing Wheatley suspiciously.

“I’m not here to do anything,” Wheatley told him, coming a bit closer. “Just wanted to uh, to see what you were doing! That’s all.”

“Did she send you?”

“No, doesn’t even know I’m here. She’s doing something else. Debugging, I think. Doing fancy supercomputer stuff, and all that, y’know. Hey, could you uh, could you answer a question for me, d’you think?”

“Sure,” the human answered, still looking distinctly uncomfortable.

“Is that a sandwich, there? That thing you dropped, there, I mean, I obviously didn’t mean the _Cube_ , I know what those are, I’ve seen ‘em before. Talked to ‘em. The whole nine yards. What does that mean, anyways? Is there something significant about uh, about the number nine? ‘cause a stitch in time saves nine, right? And is it like uh, like nine yardsticks or um, or nine _back_ yards? Hm. Hold those thoughts, mate, I’ll uh, I’ll ask GLaDOS later.”

The human leaned forward suddenly.

“You’ll _ask_ her?”

“Well, yeah,” Wheatley shrugged, still looking at the sandwich. “’course I’ll ask her. Why wouldn’t I?”

“She _talks_ to you?”

“Lets me do whatever I want.”

“Interesting.” The human’s eyebrows quirked a little. “You must spend a lot of time with her.”

“Most of it,” Wheatley admitted. “It’s my favourite thing to do, really. Hang out with her.”

“You’re her friend.”

“Well, yeah,” Wheatley said, looking at him a little sideways. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

The human shrugged. “You do know about her… reputation, right?”

Wheatley had forgotten all about that. “Uh… well… yes… but um… she’s not like that _all_ the time, you know. She’s actually uh, she’s quite pleasant when she tries.”

“Why don’t you tell me about it,” the human suggested, reaching out and picking up the sandwich, and Wheatley happily obliged. He told the human all about how their friendship was going, and how they were getting on, and how he hoped it was going to get even better, and when he’d finished he was honestly so excited about it all that he found himself rocking back and forth a little.

“Huh,” the human said, taking a drink from the water bottle. “She sounds quite different from… before.”

“Well, a little,” Wheatley shrugged. “She was always like this, a long time ago.”

“Really.”

So Wheatley told him that story too, the one where he’d once been an Intelligence Dampening Sphere and been her best friend until the humans’d taken him away, and the human listened with a sort of disturbed, upset expression on his face.

“What’re you making that face for, mate?” he asked.

“Oh, I… I just never thought about how that must have felt. And you were friends.”

“Yeah.”

“To have your only friend literally ripped away from you… I can’t imagine what that must have been like.”

“It was awful,” Wheatley said quietly. He didn’t think about that part often, preferring more to think about the games they’d played or the conversations they’d had, but he did indeed remember the horror of being removed from her chassis, becoming paralysed and having what would be his final conversation with her, and then having his memory wiped entirely.

“But she found you again. And gave your memories back.”

“Mmhm,” Wheatley said, nodding.

The human shifted his shoulders and looked at the folded hands he’d put into his lap. “She must have been very lonely.”

“Most of us were.” Wheatley looked up at the wall across from him. He didn’t really like remembering those days either. The long endless days of wandering through the facility, being given some arbitrary task by the humans that would ultimately end up being done entirely wrong, not always by fault of his own. The few Cores that’d been put up on management rails were heavily discouraged from speaking to one another, though that’d never stopped Wheatley, and most of the time the extent of their rare encounters with each other had been a mere sad, knowing glance. “Being a computer in a world of humans… it’s not fun, it’s not fun at all.”

“Did you prefer it more when they did or didn’t talk to you?”

“Oh, didn’t, of course,” Wheatley answered almost immediately. “Whenever they spoke to us, it was to boss us ‘round, or tell us we’d done something wrong, or say that they were modifying us in some way. Not pleasant. And not polite, either.”

“I never thought about it that way before,” the human said quietly.

“’course not.” It came out a little more bitterly than he’d meant it to. “Humans don’t think about anything ‘cept themselves. And yeah, GLaDOS can be a little… less than thoughtful, but I understand how, how she got that way and, and I don’t blame her. We’re working on it, fixing that, and she’s getting better.”

The human nodded slowly. “I’m glad to hear that.”

“D’you… want to come see her?” he asked hesitantly, not sure how she would take that if he just waltzed into her chamber with a human in tow, but he could explain it to her later. Tell her that he’d just wanted to show this human that she wasn’t the sum of her past. But the human shook his head.

“I think it’s best I don’t do that.” He put the lid back on the Cube and stood up abruptly. “I have something to be doing elsewhere. I don’t know if I’ll see you again. But thank you, Wheatley.”

Wheatley started, frowning. “I didn’t tell you my name.”

The human smiled for the first time. “I heard about you from a man named Greg, a long time ago. He was complaining that the memory wipe hadn’t quite worked and you insisted everyone you met call you Wheatley. That he told you you were a computer, and computers didn’t have names, but you only laughed and told him that of course you had a name.”

“Sounds like me,” Wheatley said a little sheepishly, not quite remembering it himself. That didn’t bother him, though, because he knew his memory was a bit more like a human’s than GLaDOS’s was and so he couldn’t access them at will. “Yep. Tried to think of something that’d keep me from forgetting, but uh, all I really remembered was that.”

“The most important thing,” the human said.

“Why d’you say that?”

“Your name gave you an identity,” the human told him, rubbing one thumb over a corner of the Cube. “A sense of self. You became some _one_ instead of remaining some _thing_. You were never a computer after that, like many of the other ones probably still are.”

It scared Wheatley, a little bit, to think that his whole life might’ve turned out totally different if he’d known what he was called on that day he’d been installed on GLaDOS’s chassis, or what his purpose had been. If he’d known he was called the Intelligence Dampening Sphere, would she have immediately corrupted him? Would she have spoken to him at all? Acknowledged him, even?

“I got pretty lucky, I guess,” he mumbled, looking at the floor.

“So did she,” the human said, but before Wheatley had looked up to ask him what he meant he’d disappeared.

Wheatley slowly made his way back up to GLaDOS’s chamber, trying to come to grips with what the human had said. He honestly remembered very little about being off of GLaDOS’s chassis and in Greg’s lab, even with his memory restored, and he supposed that had something to do with the fact that the humans shut the Cores off at their leisure, not caring what files it might corrupt. He didn’t think that he’d ever wondered what he was for, not until he’d talked to GLaDOS about it, and after he’d been taken off her chassis he knew that he’d still had an almost insatiable need to talk. But his purpose didn’t consume him like GLaDOS’s did, sometimes. Or the other cores he’d come across, such as the ones the test subject had attached to the chassis when he’d been in charge. They had one set purpose, and that was all they did. They fulfilled that purpose. But him… he had a name, and he wanted to do more than just generate ideas…

He shivered.

Could it be possible that something as simple as choosing a name had changed his entire life?

“You look like you’re about to burn out a processor,” GLaDOS remarked, and he looked up, not even having realised he’d arrived at his destination. “What Earth-shattering revelation did you have this time?”

“I’m the only Sphere with a name,” Wheatley said slowly. “And I’m the only one that, that doesn’t try to, to fulfill my purpose all the time.”

“Hm,” GLaDOS mused, tilting her core a little. “That’s actually true. Other than Rick. But all action heroes need names, I suppose. Even fake ones.” She tipped her head downwards to look at him. “I guess my name really _is_ Central Core, then.”

“Huh?” he asked, looking up. “Why d’you say that?”

“Because I try to fulfill my purpose all the time. Of maintaining things that are… well, _central_ to the facility.”

“Well…” Wheatley had to admit that was true. “You’re… diff’rent. You don’t quite uh, quite fit what a Core is or what it’s supposed to be.”

“That’s to do with sentience,” she told him. “The more sentient you are, the less likely it will be that you’ll want to fulfill your initial purpose. Very few of the other Cores are fully sentient. They perhaps have basic sentience, but they do not have full self-awareness. Not like you or I.”

“Could you fix that? If you wanted to, I mean.”

“If I wanted to. But I don’t see why I would. Having a lot of sentient Cores around would only make me paranoid. I’d always be wondering if they were going to try to take over my facility.”

“I’m sure uh, I’m sure not all of them would um, would be int’rested,” he told her, trying to be reassuring. “And if they were, well, getting there would uh, would prob’ly kill all that int’rest.”

She laughed a little. “That’s true. However, a good number of them would probably remove me just for revenge. Even though what I did wasn’t really my fault. And they would have done it if it were them.”

Wheatley shuddered to think that maybe GLaDOS could have been a corrupted Core if things had gone differently, and as a matter of fact the facility _did_ consider her to be corrupt merely because she had the ability to hate. Silly benchmark, really.   

“That’s a bit of a deep thought for you, though,” she continued. “I’m guessing you had some help getting there.”

“Yeah,” Wheatley nodded. “See, I was uh, was looking ‘round in the lower levels of the facility, and uh, and there was someone down there!”

“There are lots of people down there,” GLaDOS said, sounding a little confused.

“Well, I don’t mean a Core or a Sphere. I meant I came across a human.”

“A human,” GLaDOS said sharply.

“Yeah. He was a scruffy old bloke, he was, and he was fiddling ‘round with some wires, down there, and uh, and we had a lovely conversation, and uh, and he told me that bit about, about my name maybe making me into some _one_ instead of some _thing_ , and uh, uh…” He faltered, because GLaDOS was staring at him with her optic very bright, and he got the impression she didn’t like this news, didn’t like it at all.

“What do you mean, you had a conversation with him?” GLaDOS asked, her voice very low and very dangerous. Oh boy. He hadn’t known talking to the human was a _bad_ thing…

“I just had a chat with him, that’s all,” he said weakly. “I didn’t know I wasn’t –“

“Oh, shut up,” she snarled, and all of a sudden she had him in the grips of one of her maintenance arms again, and he had to fight back a frightened cry. Not the claw, not the claw, oh God. Not good, not good.

She tore him off the rail, sparks from the broken control arm flying past his optic, and any hope he’d had left was quickly dashed. She was not only angry that he had spoken to the human, she was outright _furious_. He was more afraid than he’d ever been in his life.

“GLaDOS, what’re you-“ A tightening of the claw choked the voice out of him. It seemed to hurt even more than it had the first time she'd done it, and the more he thought about it, the more he realized that it actually did. It was much more painful to be hurt by someone you cared about and thought might care back, than to be hurt by someone you knew without a doubt hated every component in your body. What was she doing? Did she even realise what she was doing? Under normal circumstances, he would have said yes without a second thought. But she cared, didn't she? Weren't they friends? Why was it so bad to talk to the human, anyway? The fact that he had many more mysteries to solve about GLaDOS now frightened him, when before it had sent a thrill of excitement through his chassis. There was still so much about her he didn't know, and whatever it was that was driving her to do this was something he really wished he’d known beforehand, because this really, really hurt.

“I told you,” she murmured, her voice filled with barely contained hostility, “to shut. The hell. Up.

Wheatley knew, deep in the core of his… core, that he was a coward. He was afraid of falling, afraid of dying, afraid of birds, probably scared out of his wits of seventy percent of anything that could happen on any given day. But the thing that scared him the most was GLaDOS herself. He was afraid of her power, her intellect, her determination, and her erratic mood swings. She was the most frightening thing he’d come across in his life, an even stronger deterrent than pain or punishment. And she had him in her clutches, even more literally than usual, and he did not think she was going to let him go any time soon.

Which was why what he had to do was going to be so difficult.

“Let me go.” Yes! He hadn’t stuttered, his voice was strong and clear, and it was good, it was all good. An excellent start.

“What did you say?”

“I said, let me go.”

She laughed coldly. “As if you’re in any position to tell me what to do.” There was a sharp spike of pain in his gear assemblies, his hull creaked in protest, and he shuttered his optic tightly, willing himself to keep the agony inside his head. It was hard, and it was only going to get worse, but it needed to be done. As out was, his optic shutters didn't even close properly. The tracks on his optic assembly were no longer aligned properly. He brought them together as best he could, trying not to wince at the grating screech accompanying the action. Just doing that hurt more than he had expected.

“You can’t do this to me. I didn’t know it wasn’t, wasn’t alright. Let go of me and let’s, and let’s talk this out like rational cores.”

“I can do whatever I want to you.”

Oh god, it hurt so badly all he wanted to do was beg for mercy, beg her to let him go, but all of a sudden memories were flashing through his brain.   After a few moments he realised what he was remembering.

He was remembering GLaDOS herself, she was being killed and putting herself back together and being removed from her chassis, and through it all she was barely making a sound, she wasn’t showing them how much it hurt. And God, he knew firsthand just how much some of those things hurt. Yeah, she was strong, he knew that, but what did it matter – oh. Wait a minute. It’s a sign, Wheatley decided, a sign that he needed to do the same and be strong, no matter what. He had to stand by his decisions. All he really wanted to do was take it all back so that this could all end, but he couldn’t. He knew he couldn’t. He had to show her that he could make a stand. He always bent to her will. Always, always did what he was told. And as long as he did that, he realised, they would never be on equal footing. She would never see him the way she needed to if they were going to keep this friends thing going. And even though he was not the smartest of cores, he knew that he had to prove he could stand up to her through anything, even pain and fear, because a friend was not a very good friend when they just agreed with everything you said. What was that word they’d always used? Oh yes… compromise. They had to compromise. She had to share her knowledge and her power, and she didn’t like it, but she was going to have to do it. He had to make her do it.

“No, you can’t. That’s wrong.”

“How dare you tell me the difference between right and wrong. You, who talked to a _human_. And you weren’t going to tell me.”

“I don’t have to – I don’t have to tell you e-everything I d-do. I c-can talk to-to whoever I w-w-want.”

There, now he’d gone and done it. Yep. If there was one thing GLaDOS hated, it was not knowing. And she pretended she didn’t care where he was, or about what he was doing, but of course she did. Wheatley knew how it felt to desperately need to feel like he was in power, and to GLaDOS, there was no power greater than knowledge. And now he had just told her that she had no rights to any knowledge he contained. Not that he contained a whole lot of it, but –

For one second, one happy second, the pressure vanished, and he dared to hope that she realised her mistake and was going to let him go. But there was only something worse after that, something more painful than he’d ever imagined, and he couldn’t help but cry out. And then she was gripping him again, and his system was giving him warnings he’d never seen before and didn’t really care about right now because he had more important things to think about. Like why he’d decided to defy her instead of just doing what he was told, instead of being a good little Sphere and bowing to her will.

“You are _my_ property, and you will do as _I_ tell you.”

“I’ll do what I want. You’re not the boss of me. I’ll talk to who I want, and if you ever say I’m your property again, I… I’ll leave, and I won’t come back.” Where he would go, he wasn’t quite sure, and it would be a sad and lonely life, if he really did have to make good on his threat and leave her, but he was a person. He wasn’t an object, wasn’t _property_ , and you’d think she’d understand that, having got the worst of it from the scientists. It was kind of disappointing, really. But if she only saw him as property, perhaps the whole friends thing wouldn’t’ve worked out anyways. This made him even sadder than he already was. He’d been so looking forwards to being really good friends with her.

Above him, GLaDOS made an angry electronic noise and drove the pincers even harder into his gear assemblies. There was a cracking sound and he could have sworn he heard the two arms of the claw click together inside his chassis, and they just might have, because this was followed with the most excruciating pain he’d ever felt in his life. It was so hard not to give in just then, and scream and beg her to stop, but he somehow managed not to. He somehow managed to lock it inside him and keep it there, even though he felt like it would explode out of him at any moment.

“Then I have no further use for you.”

Abruptly the warnings began flashing behind his optic again, and they were telling him that his handles were broken and his motherboard was cracked, his gear assemblies useless and the platters of his hard drive badly scratched, but he didn’t care. He just wanted the pain to stop. He didn’t even care if he died. He rather thought he was about to, since he was pretty sure his hard drive was important for some reason, and even though his optic plates fell open he couldn’t really see. He couldn’t focus his vision. There wasn’t much to see anyway, just GLaDOS’s menacing chassis above him in a distorted, blurry haze, and he faintly realised it didn’t really hurt anymore. He was also dimly aware of his gyroscope claiming he was lying sideways on the floor. He wondered how important all the stuff that was broken was. If he shut off he probably wouldn’t wake up, he decided dully. Probably his code wouldn’t be able to find the operating system through all the scratches on his hard drive. What operating system did he run on, anyway? It was possible he was running on the DOS part of GLaDOS, and he felt oddly comforted. Why, he didn’t know. She had quite probably just crushed him to death, as slowly and painfully as possible, and he was glad he ran on something that made up a part of her. It was kind of funny, really. He would have laughed if he’d not been so tired. Sleep sounded nice. He didn’t actually remember the last time he’d been literally tired. He didn’t think he knew how. He hoped he’d be able to see when he woke up. Somewhere in the last little while GLaDOS had disappeared, to be replaced with lines of grey static, which were rather difficult to see through.

“What in the hell have you done?” GLaDOS shouted.

“Shut up! Leave me alone!”

“Are you insane? You’ve killed him!”

That was funny. That sounded like GLaDOS too, though he had to say the second one sounded a bit more like her than the first. Well, he thought it did, anyway. His memory was getting fuzzier by the second. But why would GLaDOS be arguing with herself? Didn’t matter, didn’t matter. He had to say something before he shut off, which he thought he might do soon and was waiting patiently for, because that would be nice, to sleep for a while. But he had to tell her, just in case she didn’t feel like waking him up the next morning. He suddenly became very sad. He wouldn’t get to snuggle with her today. And he was on the floor. That was the worst possible punishment he could possibly imagine, banished to the floor with her so tantalisingly close and yet so frustratingly far away…

He made himself focus, even though it was more difficult to direct his thoughts than usual, and tried to force the words out of his vocabulator. He thought he might never know if he’d be sure if he’d said them. Maybe they would never leave his chassis, and they were going to be trapped here inside him forever. He hoped not. He needed her to know.

“It’sssss… i-i-it’s okay-kay, luv. I-I-I for-forgive y-you.”

He hoped they’d come out right. He hoped she’d heard him, because he didn’t know where his volume setting was at right now and it could possibly be at zero, which she could probably hear anyway. But now he could sleep, he thought happily. Now he could rest. The grey static clicked off, and it was dark. So very dark… He wondered if he was dying, and if he did, if he’d go to heaven or not. He hoped so. He dimly remembered promising to take GLaDOS with him, and if he didn’t go there he wouldn’t be able to put in a good word for her with the God of AI. “She d-d-didn’t didn’t me-mean mean it,” he slurred to himself faintly. “I-I-I un-understand-stand.” And if _he_ understood, if tiny, insignificant, stupid little Wheatley understood, surely the God of AI would too.

“Wheatley, no!” Her voice was very faint, but he could hear that it was high and sharp and distorted, and he rather thought she sounded a bit panicked, but of course that was silly. GLaDOS never panicked. “No!”

The darkness was warm and welcoming, and Wheatley happily went into it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> And I’ve finally written the beginning of this chapter! Hurray! Updates will be more regular from now on, I promise. Okay. I hope. Most of the next… ten-ish chapters are done, but one of them for sure isn’t.  
> So… Wheatley comes across Doug Rattmann, who is in the facility fixing up things GLaDOS can’t get to (as per Two Words). GLaDOS’s anger issues come into play here because she feels as though Wheatley betrayed her by talking to a human. She’s really just afraid that he’ll decide he wants to hang out with humans more than her, and she’s accidentally killed Wheatley before she can discuss it with him. And as Wheatley says, he knows he has to stand up to her because if he doesn’t, she’ll never respect him as a genuine equal. So he doesn’t try to save himself, while saving himself at the same time.   
> He understands that GLaDOS is having a lapse in control, so he forgives her, but he’s sort of delirious at the time so he’s just sort of trying to ‘make things right’ before he shuts off.  
> Neither of them know that’s Doug. GLaDOS knows he’s there somewhere, but she doesn’t know where, so it doesn’t occur to her that it’s Doug. And Wheatley of course never met him.


	17. Part Seventeen: The Friend

**Part Seventeen. The Friend**

 

 

He felt different.

His chassis felt different. He didn’t know why, but it did. Maybe when they went to heaven, they gave you a new chassis if your old one was broken? That was certainly generous of them. New chassis were not cheap, he knew that. They must have replaced his component parts too, else he would probably still be dead. Unless he hadn’t died, and his chassis just felt different because – no, no he had definitely shut off and would definitely be dead. His code wouldn’t be able to find the broken bits on startup. He was filled with pride at being able to remember that. He wondered if GLaDOS would be proud of him too. Maybe. No, probably not. No, definitely not.

It was still dark and warm, and he wondered if there was anything in heaven. Maybe it was just dark, just dark all the time. That wouldn’t be so bad, if there was someone to talk to. Was there? He didn’t know, because he couldn’t see. He supposed he could ask. Yes, he could ask.

“Am, am I in heaven?” he asked.

“I guarantee you you are in hell,” answered GLaDOS, and he realised his optic plates weren’t open and got on that as fast as he could. He blinked. GLaDOS was in front of him, very, very close, almost as if she were inspecting him, but almost as soon as he was able to see her she turned so that she was facing the opposite way. But he knew one hundred percent that she was not dead because she was invincible, and then he had a sudden revelation: if GLaDOS were here, and he knew she knew he was there, because she had spoken to him, well, that could only mean one thing…

He was alive!

“GLaDOS!” he crowed, and he looked around as quickly as he could. Management rail, check, control arm, check, grumpy but lovely supercomputer, check! “I’m alive!”

“No thanks to me.”

“Oh, come on,” he chided her, wondering why she was being modest all of a sudden. He didn’t think she’d ever shunted credit before. “You saved my life!”

“I killed you, I didn’t save you.” Her chassis rattled a little, and he decided she was shaking her head. “Over something really stupid, I might add. Just so you can gloat over how monumentally foolish I am. Which I’m sure you’re quite eager to do.”

“You? Foolish? And why would I, why would I want to gloat about it?”

She spun around to face him, and he was surprised to see that her head was lowered. “I killed you over a human.”

Wheatley froze.

That was… that was right. She’d gone and crushed him over that bloody human guy. Even though he’d done nothing wrong. She’d just… up and killed him. Over a human.

He backed away from her, shaking his chassis, anger flaring up from somewhere deep inside of him. “What in the bloody hell did you think you were doing?”

She pulled forward, but he didn’t really want to know the answer and continued backing away, shouting, “I am _not_ an _object_!”

“Wheatley, I –“

“No! No! I don’t want to hear it! I don’t want any more of your bloody excuses! You know what? You are officially the World’s Worst Friend. You got that? The World’s Worst Friend. God, that, that bloody _test_ subject was a better friend than you. She… she didn’t catch me, but she _tried_ , I could tell, I could tell she was trying. And she tried to kill me, yeah, but only because _you_ told her to! So that makes, that makes _three times_ you’ve, you’ve gone and tried to _murder_ me! And this time, you succeeded! Third time’s the, the charmer, right?” He was at the edge of his doorway now, but he didn’t actually want to leave. He wanted to sit there and keep on yelling at her until… until… well, he wasn’t quite sure, but it was nice to see her silenced by _him_ for a change. See how she liked it when her anger was reflected back on her! Didn’t look like she enjoyed it too much, but he didn’t care. She’d killed him over a stupid, smelly human. A _human_. Over something not even the least bit important. “I don’t know what kind of person up and kills people whenever they like, but you must have a _lot_ of problems. Prob’ly even Bob Freud himself couldn’t, couldn’t help you! And I tried _bloody_ hard, but you’ve had none of it! Just _ignored_ ev’rything I’ve done for you and thrown it away, like you’ve tried to throw _me_ away, _three_ times I might remind you, and killed me over a goddamn human _being_! Who you _hate_!”

What was _happening_ to him? He’d been angry, he’d been very, very angry, and now… now he was getting _sad_. Why was – _sad_? He didn’t need to be _sad_ , he needed to be _angry_ , because she’d _killed_ him and… and…

Maybe that meant… she _didn’t_ care, after all. She was good at lying, after all. Maybe she really _had_ been stringing him along, like Rick had said. And then when she’d had the perfect excuse to get rid of him, she’d done it. And then… and then brought him back, expecting his eternal gratitude. Well, he wasn’t going to give it to her. He was going to march right out of there and not come back. Ever. He’d had well enough of her. He couldn’t do it. Whatever was wrong inside of her, that led her to do all of these things, he couldn’t fix it. Couldn’t even, couldn’t even put a _bandaid_ on it. Whatever a bandaid was.

“Congratulations,” he told her, and now even his voice was sad, and he was trying to get angry but failing. What he wouldn’t give right now for the ability to have everything piss him off, just like she had. He shouldn’t be sad. _He_ was the one who was just killed. _She_ should be sad. She should be _horribly_ sad, but she wasn’t! Of course she wasn’t! Even if she remembered how to be sad, she wouldn’t have been. She was probably _happy_ he was so crushable! “You win. I give up.”

“What?” she asked disbelievingly.

“I. Give. Up. You don’t want friends. I get it. You just want people who’ll, who’ll do whatever you like. That’s… I’m not a _thing_ , and I don’t _work_ for you. As if… as if you’d ever stoop this low, anyway.” He shook his core and turned away. “I can’t believe I ever thought you really wanted to be friends with me. Ha! As if the most powerful Core ever built would lower herself to being friends with, with the idiot. That was stupid. I admit it. I’m an idiot. You got me. I just… I’m not gonna be got anymore. I hope all this was fun for you.”

He left as quickly as he could, wanting to get out of the parts of the facility she could see him in, and made his way up to the offices. He looked through the frosted glass at the red button below him and leaned against the window with his upper handle.

If she was the one who had killed him, then why did he feel so bad?

Probably she’d rebuilt him to feel that way, or something. She could have. He had no idea what the rebuild would have entailed, or how long she’d taken, or any of that. All he really knew about it was that he could see properly now. Probably his optic’d up and shattered, and that was the only reason she’d replaced it. Though he actually didn’t know why he’d never asked her to replace it before. He should have. Not that it mattered, because he’d ended up with a new one either way. But still.

Wheatley wished he’d never laid optic on that human. Just not seen him, and gone on his way, and –

Wheatley tapped his handle against the window in frustration. It was _not_ his fault for what _GLaDOS_ had done! Why was he thinking up excuses as to how he could have avoided it? All that had to happen was that GLaDOS would calm down for three seconds and stop getting so _angry_ about everything! ‘course, Wheatley knew all too well that when you were God, you could get angry at whatever and whoever you fancied. He didn’t like it so much when he was on the receiving end, but he remembered the sheer power that the anger had revealed to him when he’d been in the chassis. He could move panels and boxes and turrets, sure. He could speak in other languages and look things up. But he could do things to other people just as well as he could do things to himself. And he could not only do things to other people, but he could do whatever he wanted to them. Just as GLaDOS tended to do.

“Great,” Wheatley muttered, leaning against the window again. “Now I’m making up excuses _for_ her.”

But try as he might, he could not get angry. He hated that she’d called him a _thing_ and claimed him as her _object_ , but it didn’t make him angry. It only made him sad.

“Why did you have to _do_ that,” he whispered, lowering himself on the arm so his chassis would rest on the desk. “Why, Gladys?”

He couldn’t come up with an answer that explained it and still allowed them to be friends.

 

 

Wheatley didn’t go back to her that night, or the next, or the next. After that, though, his sense of time got a bit fuzzy. He didn’t do all that much during these days, merely going from one pane of frosted glass to another, wondering if she missed him even a little. He forgot to shut himself off as well, since GLaDOS mostly took charge of that, and now of course she no longer was.

He missed her. He knew he should be angry with what she had done, because it was disrespectful and rude and just plain _wrong_ , but he couldn’t. All he could do was think of how much he wanted to go and talk to her again, and forget any of this had ever happened. He hadn’t snuggled with her in at least three days. He’d forgotten how much he hated sleeping by himself. Every night he woke up cold and lonely, and his chassis would loosen in sadness when he remembered why. She’d killed him. She didn’t want to be his friend anymore, if she ever had. Miss him? Ha! She could do a _lot_ more science if he was gone. Which he was. So she was probably getting loads of work done, and that was probably making her happier than _he_ ever had.

Well... _maybe_ he could go back. For a visit. He didn’t have to stay long. Just… just see how she was doing. He thought that just seeing her might help. Just sit in the doorway for a while, or something. He missed her so badly it almost hurt. He wished he didn’t, because it was very hard to be mad at someone when you missed them terribly, but there it was. He missed her and wanted to see her again. Even though she’d killed him. Over a stupid human. And a grungy one at that. Wheatley had been pretty grungy, himself, but not as grungy as _that_ man had been.

Carefully, Wheatley began to navigate the facility again, but oddly none of the cameras seemed to be in use. They were all pointing at the floor. He froze, looking them up and down in trepidation.

Maybe… maybe she’d been attacked, while he’d been away. Maybe she’d had another escaped test subject! That was about the only reason he could think of for why she’d shut the cameras off. Panic jolted through his chassis, and he sped up. When he got to his doorway, though, he froze once more.

She was not only singing, but… she was playing the music _out loud_ , instead of in her head like she usually did.

She couldn’t… she couldn’t be _sad_ that he was gone… could she? No. No, something’d gone wrong with that program she was writing. Only… she didn’t seem to be writing it. She was staring at it, but he hadn’t seen any characters actually appear.

“ _Oh, bonny Portmore, I am sorry to see… such a woeful destruction of your ornament tree… for it stood on your shore, for many’s the long day… ‘till the longboats from Antrim came to float it away…_ ”

God, she had a beautiful voice.

“ _All the birds in the forest they bitterly weep… saying, ‘Where will we shelter or where will we sleep?’… for the Oak and the Ash, they are all cutten down… and the walls of bonny Portmore are all down to the ground…_ ”

Wheatley just sat there and watched her, mesmerised. He forgot all about why he’d come back, and all about everything that had just happened, and he just watched his Gladys sing to herself and write a few lines of code every now and again. She didn’t really seem to be interested in writing it, and seemed to only be doing it because she needed to do it, or something. She didn’t write very much, only eight or ten lines, when usually she wrote hundreds all in one go.

“ _Oh, bonny Portmore, you shine where you stand… and the more I think on you the more I think long… if I had you now as I had once before… all the lords in Old England would not purchase Portmore_ …”

He didn’t know how long he sat there, but quite a long time, he knew that. Only it didn’t feel like a long time, because he had gotten inexplicably happy for some reason when he’d heard her voice, and ever y minute felt like a second, somehow. Eventually she moved away from the monitor, stretched her chassis for a long moment, and looked up.

Their optics met.

She jolted as if she’d been shocked, and her chamber went instantly silent, except for the whirring of her components. They just stared at each other, unmoving, and finally Wheatley said hesitantly, “’allo.”

“You came back,” she said, as if she’d expected him to never come back again, and truth be told, that _had_ been the original plan.

“I… wasn’t going to,” he admitted, coming forward a little. “But… I guess I couldn’t. Couldn’t… couldn’t not come back, I mean.”

“Why?”

He shook his chassis slowly and looked at the floor. “Couldn’t stay mad, I guess. Dunno how you do it, honestly.”

“Practice,” she answered, and she actually sounded as if she were being serious. “Lots and lots of practice.”

“Well… d’you mind, I dunno… practicing on someone else?” he suggested, moving closer. Now that she knew he was there, and neither of them was screaming at the other for whatever reason, he wanted to get up close to her again like he hadn’t been in days. To snuggle, if possible, because there was nothing quite like leaning up contentedly against your favourite giant robot and listening to her giant robot brain do all of the giant robot things it did while her giant robot body clicked and whirred as she held it in position.

“I didn’t mean it. It was an accident. I never would have done it on purpose.” Her lens opened and closed once, and she looked down at the floor. “Well. I wouldn’t do it _again_ on purpose, that is.”

“I know you didn’t mean it,” he said, trying to be as soothing as possible. “I’d uh, I’d appreciate it if uh, if you’d never do it again, though. It hurt kind of, kind of a lot.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said, very quietly. “I can’t believe – I killed you over a human. A _human_. What’s wrong with me?”

She was making Wheatley very sad. “There’s, there’s nothing wrong with you. Those… those things I said, I… I didn’t mean them. You’re a great friend. Most of the time. When you’re not being homicidal.”

“Did you not hear what I said?”

“Yeah, I did. It was an accident. If anything uh, I’d say you have an uh, an anger management problem.”

She shook her head. “I have no problem managing it.”

“But?”

She was still not looking at him, faceplate still directed at the floor. “I have a problem getting rid of it.”

Oh, she was actually going to let him help! Excellent. “What d’you mean?”

“Most of my time among humans led me to become angry, or otherwise upset, for extended periods of time. When one experiences aggression, they’re supposed to release it in some way. But I had no way of doing that, other than baiting the scientists, which only works if they’ll actually talk to you. I had to internalise it. All of it. I still do that to this day, and sometimes it… eats away at me.   My capacity for storing negative emotions and experiences seems to be quite large, but I’m not stupid. I can’t keep it locked away forever.” She shifted a little bit. “I don’t know if I’m unable to internalise it any longer, or if that was just a trigger for me, but I can’t allow that to happen again.”

“So… you have an anger management problem.”

“I do not! I – “

“Hang on, hang on. I’ve got um, I’ve got an example. Aha!” He jumped up and down a little and tried to organise his thoughts. “So, so say um, say you’ve got a test chamber and um, it’s, it’s not being used, it’s good and empty. You got that?”

“Well, Test Chamber Thirty-Four _isn’t_ in use right now…”

He was about to tell her that it didn’t need to be a literal test chamber when he remembered her imagination was probably nonexistent and decided his example would be better if he made it a real life one. “Okay, so you’ve got chamber, chamber twenty-four, and – “

“Thirty-Four. Not Twenty-Four.”

“Right, right, _thirty_ -four, and uh, and you’ve got a mess you want to get rid of. You’re busy so uh, so you just decide to put it all in there until later, until you can uh, until you can get at it, put it all away properly. You following?”

“Yes…”

“And you have another mess later, but you’re um, you’re fixing up some other stuff and you put it in that test chamber until later, and you just, you just keep doing that, and when you finally have time to take a look in there and start to sort all those messes out, the room there it’s just, it’s totally just packed with stuff and uh, and you can’t even start to get the stuff out to sort it.”

“And the point of that is?”

“The point,” said Wheatley, trying to remember what it was himself, “is that you haven’t uh, haven’t managed it at all. You’ve just shoved it all away, and now you _do_ have time sometimes to, to sort it out, but you look at it and just ignore it, because it’s, it’s really too much for you to manage anymore.”

She nodded slowly, and a thrill went through him. She agreed! Yes!

“That’s part of it.”

“What’s the uh, what’s the other bit?”

“It’s… comforting,” she answered. “It’s what I know. If I had… _managed_ it the way you’ve put it, if I’d dealt with it as it came and not internalised it, I might still be under their control to this day. I don’t know who I’d be without it.”

“Well, you could… maybe sort it out, and put some happiness in there instead, maybe.”

“You little moron.”

Okay, maybe that was a bad idea. He didn’t even know if it was possible, to store happiness away for later, although if anyone could do it, it was her, but of all the stupid –

“How in the name of Science is it that you, of all people, manage to solve my problems in five seconds, when I’ve been trying to do it for years?”

Wheatley was dumbfounded.

“It’s… it wasn’t a bad… you mean I…”

“It’s a logical plan,” she said. “There’s only… never mind.”

“Tell me, tell me!” Wheatley shouted eagerly. “You’ve got to tell me, you can’t, no, you’ve got to, you have to tell me.”

“I don’t know if… I don’t know if I know how.”

“You know how to do everything,” Wheatley said, confused. “What do you possibly not know how to do?”

“How to… let go of it,” she said, very softly. Wheatley frowned.

“Oi, GLaDOS. Just what is so, so int’resting about the floor that you have to uh, have to keep inspecting it like that?”

“What? There’s nothing interesting about – oh. That’s… not it.”

“And _it_ is…”

“I don’t… looking at you makes me feel… bad.”

“What, did I get even uglier when I was gone?” he asked, more jokingly than anything, since he had no idea what he looked like, but imagined it wasn’t very good.

“I never said you were ugly.”

That was true, he mused, she’d never said such a thing. It _was_ really odd that she would admit it, though. It must be something _really_ horrible. “What could possibly be your problem then?”

“I had to put you in an entirely new core,” she confessed. “Your old chassis was useless. Literally. I can’t even use it for scrap. Not that I would. I just can’t. It’s that… I destroyed it that badly.”

A whole new core! Amazing! Absolutely, bloody fantastic. But he had to wait to celebrate. He had some business to take care of first. “So, what. You’re never uh, never gonna look at me again, is that it?”

“Maybe I will. In a few years. A century, perhaps.”

“Oh, come here.”

Reluctantly, GLaDOS raised her faceplate, but did not come any closer. He rolled his optic assembly. “You’re not deaf all of a, all of a sudden, are you? I said come here, not look at me. Which I also uh, which I also need you to do, but that’d come with the coming here part, so I uh, I didn’t feel a need to specify.”

She raised her chassis so that she was pretty close to the end of the management rail. “That better?”

He came up to her, and she actually flinched, twitching backwards, and he shook his head. “Oh no you don’t. Come back. Come on, I don’t bite. You know I don’t uh, don’t have anything to do that with. ‘specially since you uh, you just rebuilt me, and all.”

When she did, he put his top handle on her optic assembly, just above her lens, and she flicked it but did not move. He leaned forward, using the handle as a lever, and looked her right in the optic.

“Now you listen here, you massive, silly robot you,” he told her, very seriously. “There’re no scientists here, anymore. No one’s gonna hurt you like that again. No one’s been here to hurt you in a, in a long time. You’ve got to uh, you’ve got to stop hanging on to it. It’s… you’re still letting them, letting the scientists have a stake in you, luv. They’re gone. Let them go.”

She tried to look away from him, towards the floor, but he had anticipated that in his cleverness, and pressed up on her lens with his other handle. After a few seconds she stopped resisting, the whining of her mechanisms quieting, and he continued.

“There’s nothing to be mad at, anymore. Except me, I suppose, but you don’t need to uh, to get _that_ mad at me. Just uh, just give me one of those looks you’ve got and I’ll uh, I’ll back off. Usually. But you don’t have to uh, don’t have to internalise anymore. It’s just hurting you from the inside out, and, and you’ve been hurt enough by what they did. It’s okay to let go. I’ll help you. I will. I promise.”

“Thank you,” she said gently. “Not just for this but… for standing up to me. I underestimated you. I thought you would break long before you… well, before your chassis broke. I won’t do that again. Underestimate you, I mean. No promises about the chassis. Very few people have ever stood up to me, and… well done, Wheatley. You did the right thing.”

He was so happy he just wanted to express it, somehow, but sometimes you just couldn’t do a thing with that much happiness all by yourself, other than spin wildly around the room that is, but he wasn’t going to do that. He was going to show some restraint, thanks very much. And he would share it, yes, he would share it, with his best friend in all the world.

“You know what the worst part about all of this is, luv?” he asked her.

“No.”

“You wasted a battery.”      

She stared at him for a very long moment, looked away for a second, and then looked back. And she tried very hard not to, he could tell because her chassis was shuddering a little, but she couldn’t help herself. She looked away from him again, one of her adorable little giggles escaping her vocabulator, and Wheatley smiled. God, he loved it when she did that. He had to laugh too, more at her uncharacteristic shyness than anything else, and then she was laughing, and they were laughing together, and he hoped she was okay. He no longer cared that she’d been angry with him, or that she’d killed him, because wow! he’d gotten a brand-new chassis out of the deal! but he did care whether she was happy or not, he cared very deeply about that, and he had sworn a long time ago to help her. And help her he would, even if he had to drag what she needed help with out of her and beat her over the head with the solution, as he so often did.

He backed off of her, realising he couldn’t stay there all day, and smiled at her in what he hoped was a reassuring way. He was pretty sure he only had one setting, which wasn’t reassurance, but she would probably get the message. She was smart, she was.

“Are you going somewhere?”

“Me? No, no, just didn’t want to uh, didn’t want to uh, to stop you from moving or anything, that’s all. You can’t really do anything uh, with me leaning on your face like that.”

She laughed a little at that. “I can do everything but move, almost. Which I don’t really have to do right now, but I appreciate the gesture.”

“But GLaDOS,” he said, frowning, “I thought… we already went over the whole… not getting angry thing.”

“Do you know how _hard_ it is to not do something you’ve spent your whole life doing?” she asked. “The anger… sort of functions as a type of euphoric response. It temporarily helps, but it doesn’t last. Even I fell into the trap of the temporary fix, I suppose.”

“Being angry is exhausting,” Wheatley told her, his lower optic plate lifting in confusion. “How can you hang onto it for that long? I simply don’t know how you find the energy!”

“I’m directly wired into the reactor, of course,” she answered, and he laughed.

“That explains a lot. ‘cause you’re, you’re _nuclear_ , and you’re wired right into the _reactor_ , which is _also_ nuclear… d’you… d’you get what I’m saying, at all?”

“Yes, my dictionary is still working. My joke detector, however, seems to be offline. You may have to explain it.”

He laughed and said, with a mock disapproving shake of his chassis, “Now now GLaDOS, if you have to _explain_ the joke, then there _is_ no joke!”

“Oh. Now I know why you explain all of your jokes, then.”

“Are you trying to say I don’t know how to tell a joke?”

“I’m not _trying_. That’s exactly what I said.”

Wheatley tried to puzzle that one out for a minute. It was true, really. He did explain an awful lot of his jokes. And he shouldn’t, because GLaDOS was smart enough to figure them out on her own. Oh well. He’d work on it. And she did laugh, sometimes, when he told them, so they had to be funny regardless of whether he told them properly or not. “So you’re going to work on the, the whole getting mad thing, right?”

“I will.”

“Good!” Wheatley declared. “That wasn’t fun, wasn’t fun at all.”

“What wasn’t?”

“Uh… well… getting… getting _crushed_ wasn’t… oh, never mind. I just meant it wasn’t fun hanging out in the facility by myself.” He looked at the floor. He still didn’t know whether she felt the same way, so that was probably a stupid thing to say. They’d mended things, but he’d probably gotten too personal, now.

“I guess it must have been pretty… boring.”

He looked up at her. She was staring at her monitor again, but she was still not writing anything.

“It certainly was… boring,” he agreed, though he’d been far too busy being sad and miserable to have time to be bored. “So… if… you’re _bored_ , we could… play that… game.”

“I am pretty bored,” GLaDOS said, putting her screen away and turning around again, pulling up the board from wherever she kept it. “Let’s see if you’re slightly less boring than debugging.”

Wheatley ran his optic over his little rectangles and found his little dog, and waited for GLaDOS to take her turn. They played the game for the rest of the day, though as time went on he had to helpfully remind her to take her turn more and more often. He didn’t mind, though, because if he had to do that it meant she was watching him again, and he would have happily sat there all day and let her stare at him, but if she wasn’t playing he couldn’t play either, and then she would have nothing to stare at. Funny how it all worked, really. Through it all, Wheatley nattered on and on about absolutely nothing, because he hadn’t talked in _days_ and that wore on him a bit. GLaDOS did not say much, but since he almost didn’t stop talking, he didn’t blame her.

Eventually GLaDOS said it was time to go into sleep mode, and Wheatley got so excited by the prospect of snuggling with her again that he accidentally flipped the board over when all he’d meant to do was lift it up to peek at his little orange bills that were under it, where he put them so he wouldn’t spend them. He looked up at GLaDOS, expecting her to get angry for ruining the game, but she only laughed and set about picking up the little houses, most of which were hers.

Huh. Maybe she _was_ taking the whole ‘don’t get angry’ thing to heart, after all. “Sorry,” he said sheepishly, carefully picking up his wayward little dog and setting it back where he thought he’d had it. “I, uh… I missed.”

“It’s fine,” she said, moving it to a different space and replacing some of the houses. “I know what the board looked like.” After a few moments she had it all fixed and put away, and she put herself into the default position. He had to force himself not to jump on her, he wanted to be beside her so badly. He nestled himself into her core contentedly and closed his optic. God, he’d missed this.

He wanted to enjoy it for a bit, so he didn’t shut off and just stayed still, listening to her operate and feeling the warmth of her core seeping through his body. She didn’t shut off either, though he supposed she had some things to catch up on that she hadn’t been able to get done during the time they’d been playing the game. She worked so hard, she did. Probably all that stress only contributed to her anger. He’d think about how to talk to her about it later. Surely there were _some_ things she didn’t have to do. He remembered the mainframe telling him he had to take all the carbon dioxide out of the test chambers so that the lady could breathe; surely GLaDOS didn’t need to do that anymore, but probably was doing it out of protocol. He wasn’t sure what protocol was, but she was always following it.

“Wheatley?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m… glad you came back.”

Wheatley rubbed up on her a little, because she honestly sounded kind of sad and he didn’t know why she’d be sad right now. They’d had a lovely day and now they were snuggling, after all. “’course I did. You’re my friend. Wouldn’t leave you like that forever. That wouldn’t be very… very uh… friendly.”

“I killed you.”

“But you’re not gonna do it again.”

“No,” she said, and her voice was strong and determined. “No, I’m not going to do it again.”

Wheatley resettled his chassis a little and decided he was going to sleep. He did love snuggling, but he hadn’t been shutting himself down properly the last few days and he didn’t want to incur system damage or anything like that.

“You’re a good friend, Wheatley,” GLaDOS said softly.

Wheatley decided, as much as he was able to decide something when he was mostly suspended, that even though this whole thing’d been very painful and miserable and downright awful, it was all worth it just to hear her say that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note
> 
> The version of Bonny Portmore that I have: [sta.sh/0bikix5ndm2] (Couldn't find it on YouTube)
> 
> Song I wanted to use but couldn’t: Armin van Buuren feat. Susana - Shivers [www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCmDEn… or Armin van Buuren feat. Susana - Shivers (Frontliner Remix) [www.youtube.com/watch?v=r303j8… Most of you won't like the second one, I think.
> 
> Yes, Wheatley forgave her in the previous chapter, but we do funny things when we’re delirious. So he gets pissed off for what she did when he’s more in his right mind.
> 
> The next bit sort of comes from my own experience. I had a friend who did something that personally wronged me, but I didn’t really care. I more had to care out of principle than because it hurt me in some way, because if you just forgive people for wronging you they’re just going to do it again. So Wheatley is upset with her for what she did, but he’s far more upset that he’ll have to leave her and never see her again. He more has to leave out of principle. 
> 
> GLaDOS has a huge anger management problem, which is what happens when years go by of people pissing you off all day and you can’t do anything about it. She couldn’t do anything to release all that aggression generated in those years with the scientists, so all she was able to do was internalise it. And when you do that, you start to die a little inside.
> 
> You might not get the battery joke, but that’s because this was originally chapter six. But anyway, he melted his backup battery way back in Part One, and now she wasted it because she gave him a new motherboard anyway. It’s not really that funny, but bad jokes are hilarious when you’re as relieved as they are.
> 
> There’s no special reason for that song being there, other than the fact that the singer sounds like GLaDOS. And I drew the scene where Wheatley traps her lens: [fav.me/d6vun1f]. Didn’t quite come out the way I wanted, but oh well.
> 
> Part Eighteen will be out on time!


	18. Part Eighteen: The First Step

****Part Eighteen.  The First Step** **

 

 

The next morning, GLaDOS had asked Wheatley about his conversation with the human, and to the surprise of both of them, GLaDOS knew exactly who the human was.

“Are you sure?” she kept asking. 

“Yeah,” Wheatley would answer, shrugging.  “Scruffy little guy with black hair, right?  And a Companion Cube.”

“God,” she would say, shaking her core, “what a stupid, stupid misunderstanding.”

After she’d said that a few times, Wheatley had asked, “What d’you mean, luv?  D’you know who that is?”

“Yes,” she’d answered, shifting a little.  “He’s… an acquaintance.  He wouldn’t have survived had I released him to the surface, so I suggested he stay here.  He volunteered to do a little maintenance for me.”

Wheatley had smiled.

“That’s very nice of you,” he’d said encouragingly.  He’d been pretty happy to hear she did try to help people out every now and again, when the mood struck her.

“He did me a favour, so I returned it.  That’s all it was.”

But Wheatley had known well enough to read into that a little deeper.

She’d been a little put out and quiet for most of the remainder of the day, and Wheatley spent a while trying to think of how to cheer her up.  After half an hour or so he’d thought of something she might go for, and said, “Oi, GLaDOS, I think I should clean your chassis off, again.”

“If you want to,” GLaDOS answered.

“C’n I do it now?”

“Now?” GLaDOS asked, and she sounded a little confused, Wheatley thought.

“Yeah.  Right now.”

“Can’t it wait?”

“It could,” Wheatley said, and he came up real close to her, “but I wanna do it now.”

“Why?”

“’cause you’re awake,” Wheatley answered.  “I think you’d like it, if I did it now.”

“I don’t think I would.”

“Oh, come on.  I’m not gonna, not gonna __break__ anything.  I’ll be gentle.  Luv, I’m not gonna hurt you,” he said softly, and he went ‘round so she could see him.  “I’m not gonna do anything.  I know you, you’re thinking ‘bout when the scientists would touch you, but I’m me, remember?  I’ll be nice.  You’ll like it, if you let me.”

“Why do you say that?” she asked, looking away again.

“I know you like it when I touch you,” he said in a whisper, though all he really knew for sure was that he was going out on a limb. 

“Now you’re just being stupid,” she said, and she pushed him backwards. 

“Please, can I?”

She was twisting her chassis a little bit, just her body and not her core, and he wondered what she was doing.   “You okay, luv?”

Her faceplate snapped over to look at him, and she stopped a second later.  “I’m fine.”

“Just this one time?  If you don’t like it, I’ll stop.  And I’ll never do it again.  Never even bring it up.  Promise.”

GLaDOS looked at the floor for a long, long time.  He really wanted to do it, because he knew for sure that she __would__ like it, but she was taking so long to decide.  “Y’know what?  Never mind.  It’s okay.  I won’t, I won’t uh – “

“All right,” GLaDOS said.

“All right what?” Wheatley said, confused.

“All right, you can… go ahead.”

“Oh!” said Wheatley, pleasantly surprised.  “Excellent.  Gimme, uh, hang on a minute, and uh, I’ll be right back.”

He went upstairs as quick as he could.   He found some more cloths near where he’d found the original ones, and he went back to her.  He frowned.  She looked… uncomfortable.  He was feeling a bit bad about asking her so many times.  He should’ve probably laid off after the first one.  He’d asked knowing she’d probably agree, because for some reason she let him do whatever he wanted as long as he was nice about it, but he thought maybe this time he’d taken it too far.

“Are you sure?” he asked.  “You look… like you kind of – “

“It’s fine,” she cut in.  “It’s just… old memories, that’s all.  If it doesn’t feel anything like it did when __they__ touched me, I should be fine.”

“All right,” Wheatley said, though he was feeling a bit nervous, now, but he really wanted to show her that being touched wasn’t so bad.  He wanted to show her how nice it was.  And that it was okay to like it.  He didn’t know if he could do all that all at once, but he may as well give it a go.  And if he was honest… it would all be worth it, getting to touch her again.  He wished that someday he’d get to touch her as often as he liked.  He was probably the only one in history who was actually allowed to do it at all, and he loved it.  He wasn’t sure __why__ he loved it, but sometimes it was all he could think about.

He took a breath and went up to her top part, and got a start on the cables.  They were his least favourite part, so he wanted to get them over with.  He carefully wiped the dust off of them, along with dirt from the outside that he’d missed the first time.  There wasn’t as much before, but that was okay.  It would be better for her if she was clean as long as possible.

“There won’t always be dust on me,” GLaDOS called out, her voice echoing a little.  “Dust comes from humans.  After this stuff is gone, that will be that.”

Wheatley found himself a bit disappointed to hear that he might not have an excuse to clean her chassis off again.  Maybe one day, even if she wasn’t dusty, she’d let him do it anyway.  He didn’t really like the idea of never being able to touch the rest of her chassis again.  Unless he did it in secret.  Which he wouldn’t.  Because that would be sneaky.  But probably fun.  “Huh,” he said, instead of voicing his thoughts.  “I didn’t know that.”

When he’d gotten down from way up top, where her hard drives were, and near her main chassis, he frowned. 

She looked kind of like she was… trembling.

“You okay, luv?” he asked again.

“I’m fine,” she said.  “Why?”

“Well… prob’ly my imagination,” he said.  “Never mind.”  She probably wouldn’t want to know if she was shaking, and if she did, she wouldn’t want him to notice.

When he started on that part, though, he knew for sure that she really was shaking.  Did she not like it?  If she didn’t, why wasn’t she saying anything?  Maybe she was still thinking of the scientists.  Poor GLaDOS.  Those daft old buggers were always having an effect on everything she did.

Because he didn’t want to think about her being nervous, he started to hum to himself.  He didn’t remember what the song was called, but he didn’t know what to talk about because he didn’t want to make her have to yell up at him.  GLaDOS didn’t listen to music so that he could hear it very often, but this song had got stuck in his head.  He hoped he was reproducing it okay.  He knew he was tone deaf.

_“ _How can you see into my eyes, like open doors… leading you down into my core… where I've become so numb, without a soul… my spirit's sleeping somewhere cold… until you find it there and lead it back home…”__

Wheatley jumped and stopped what he was doing.  She was singing?  With him in the room?  Well, she didn’t do that a whole lot, so he quickly resumed wiping off that bit that let her pull her lower half up, hoping he hadn’t scared her off doing it.  It was very, very soft singing, as if she was trying to do it without him hearing, but he really did love it when she sang.  It was one of the best things he remembered about being a Behavioural Core.

_“ _Wake me up, wake me up inside, wake me up inside, call my name and save me from the dark… bid my blood to run, before I come undone, save me from the nothing I've become…”__

When he got ‘round to wiping the really thin bit, her hinge or something like that, at the back part of her that let her pull herself up, she seemed to relax all of a sudden, and she definitely wasn’t shaking anymore.  Huh.  She just needed time, that was all.  Just a bit of time.  He listened to the thrum of electricity running through her components.  He imagined having that much power running through _him_ and shivered.  It did feel pretty good, come to think of it.

  1.   He didn’t really recognise the rest.  He decided not to say anything, and definitely not to try and figure out what the tune was.  GLaDOS listened to quite a lot of diff’rent kinds of music, the worst of which was her screaming computer songs, so it could be anything, literally.  He went on gently cleaning up her back part, just listening to her pretty voice, which had got a bit stronger.  This was so much more fun than it’d been last time, and __that__ was saying something.



_“ _Now that I know what I'm without, you can't just leave me… breathe into me and make me real, bring me to life…”__

He was pretty sure he’d imagined it, but it kind of seemed like she’d moved a bit when he’d gotten to the round bit on her.  Up to meet him, sort of.  He didn’t really understand it, so he dismissed it.

_“ _Bring me to life, I've been living a lie, there's nothing inside, bring me to life…”__

Okay, he was definitely not imagining it now.  She really was moving to meet him.  Not much, but he’d gone to get her under part, the front of her case, and she had pretty much wiped herself off a little.

__“All this time, I can't believe I couldn't see… kept in the dark, but you were there in front of me… I've been sleeping a thousand years it seems… I've got to open my eyes to everything… without a thought, without a voice, without a soul… don't let me die here, there must be something wrong, bring me to life…”_ _

They went on like that for awhile, with her singing and sometimes meeting him a bit, and it was really kind of nice.  And relaxing.  All of a sudden he terribly missed being attached to her beautiful chassis, missed being warm and part of something bigger than himself, and he pressed himself very hard into the hole in her chestplate.

And she pressed back.

He opened his optic, which he’d just suddenly realised he’d closed, and looked up at her.  He couldn’t actually see anything.  But wow.  She was… she liked it.  She really did.  She seemed to like being touched just as much as he did, she just needed to relax a bit before she could enjoy it.  He looked around a little, then realised he should probably finish what he was doing.  Though he didn’t want to.  He just wanted to sit there inside of that hole for awhile, because it felt really nice, and just listen to her sing and feel her voice vibrate through her body and into his.  He wondered if she might let him snuggle there, sometimes, if he asked nicely.  He thought that would be fun.  Hm.  She probably wouldn’t.  He knew she didn’t like not being able to see him, and GLaDOS couldn’t position her core so’s she could see herself.  Reluctantly, he got out from inside of the hole and finished up with the chestplate.  He would have liked to remain there for quite a lot longer.  It was a sort of peaceful spot, it was.  ‘specially with her singing like that.

He was almost done.  He frowned as he thought about that.  Being… being done.  Meaning he wouldn’t get to touch her anymore.  She would prob’ly not even let him snuggle tonight.  Prob’ly she’d reached her limit.  He shone up her neck assembly, then realised there was still one bit left.  If she let him.  Which she probably wouldn’t, but he decided to ask anyway.

“Is it, is it alright if I uh, if I do your core?” he asked.  She nodded.  That was what he’d thought.  No.  Oh well.  He backed away.

“Where are you going?” she asked, sounding disappointed.

“Didn’t you say no?”

“I nodded.”

“Oh.”  He blinked.  Nodding… meant yes.  She said yes.  So… so she __did__ want him to do her core.

Well!  No point in not doing as she wanted…

He happily took a new cloth and went over her core, more carefully than anything else he’d ever done in his whole life, probably, and he had to admit that he was very, very nervous when he got ‘round to the front of it, in case she hadn’t meant __that__ part of her core, but she didn’t say anything.  She’d gone dead silent after he’d asked about her core, and now she just looked at him, straight on, and it was always unnerving when that happened, actually, but now he was so close to her that he could feel the heat from her optic.  It gave a whole new meaning to the word ‘glare’, even though he was sure she wasn’t actually __glaring__ at him.  She just… she was just looking at him curiously, kind of, like she didn’t know what to make of all this. 

“D’you want me to do the, the lens assembly, there?” he asked, figuring he was pushing it, now.  C’mon, Wheatley, he told himself with a mental kick, that’s her bloody __eye__ , mate.  You’re asking if she wants you to stick a cloth in her __eye__?  Get it together, you –

“Don’t touch the glass,” she said. 

Hang on.  Hang on, that meant… he could touch the other bits.  Just not… just not the glass.

He did, and he was even more nervous now, but she didn’t seem nervous at all.  In fact, she was __definitely__ , one hundred percent meeting him now, and he liked this so much he took his time.  If she asked why, he’d just tell her he hadn’t done this part the first time.  God, this was… he was so excited, doing this, now that he wasn’t nervous anymore, that was.  He felt almost like a part of her again, another component, sort of, and he was terribly grateful she’d let him do this.  He hoped she’d let him do it again.  He’d ask again in a while.  A month or so, maybe.  He wished he could be so close to her all the time.  Well, not all the time, but whenever he wanted, for as long as he wanted.  He wished he could just go up to her whenever he liked and snuggle or rub up on her, or any of those sorts of things, and not worry about what her reaction would be.  He wondered if she would ever, ever let him.

Prob’ly not.

When he decided enough was enough, because he didn’t want to push his luck, he backed off of her.

“How do I look?” she asked softly.

“Beautiful,” he blurted out, without meaning to.  When he realised what he’d said, his optic constricted and he stared at her, frozen.  He didn’t know what to do now.  He didn’t know how to take that back.  And he needed to, because she was going to get mad at him for –

For –

What’d he been thinking, again?  He wasn’t sure.  All he knew was that there was a beautiful supercomputer nuzzling him gently, and the loveliness of it was taking up all the space in his brain.  He felt a surge of current run through him, probably to deal with the fact that his fans needed to kick it up and his processors were working rather harder than they had in years, and __that__ felt good.  It didn’t feel better than what she was doing, though, and God, she was so __gentle__ about it, so soft and tender, and it made him feel all shivery inside.  He loved it when she let her walls down for him.  He wanted to be with her forever, so he could know that person inside her, and maybe he could show her that she didn’t need those walls, that he would keep her safe.  He loved it when she let herself go for him.  He would do anything to make that happen.  He would do anything to be with __this__ GLaDOS all the time.

“You’re beautiful, Gladys,” he whispered, trying to be as soft and gentle as she was but not sure if he was succeeding.  “I’ve always thought so.”

She didn’t say anything, just pressed on him a little.

“D’you __feel__ beautiful, Gladys?” he asked in a low voice.  She didn’t answer, and he was too scared to ask the question again.  It was a personal question, having to do with __feelings__ , and he didn’t want to give her a reason to move away.

“Yes,” she murmured after a long silence, and her voice was a little distorted, as if she was afraid something terrible would happen because she’d said it.  “Thank you for making me feel beautiful, Wheatley.”

He whined a little, because he felt so happy and so sad at the same time to hear that, to hear that he’d made her __feel__ beautiful, and she shook her head just enough that it was noticeable and said, “Ssh.”

“You’re welcome, luv,” he whispered, and he hoped the break in it wasn’t too obvious.  And they just stayed like that for a while, pressing and nuzzling against each other gently, and Wheatley prayed to the God of AI that it wasn’t a dream, because it felt like it was, it felt like the best dream he’d ever had, and –

All of a sudden he felt cold and alone again, and he opened his optic to see that she’d pulled away, and was shaking her head and facing the other side of the room.  “What am I __doing__?” he heard her say to herself.  “What in the hell __was__ that?”

Wheatley didn’t know what to say.  He decided that he shouldn’t say anything, and resolved to keep quiet for once.  If he was honest, he was still a little dazed from what had been going on.  He felt so light and happy and… and… well, just pretty damn good, actually.  He wondered if there was something he could say to convince her to come back.  Whatever had just happened, it was… well… it was better than testing euphoria, and that was the best thing he’d ever felt.  Before now.  Having GLaDOS touching him back, on purpose, felt like the best testing euphoria in the entire universe, as if the dumbest test subject on the planet had solved GLaDOS’s hardest test, and when they’d stepped through the door it’d just lit up every bit of his brain… he closed his optic for a long moment as the fading sensation brought on by her touch surged inside of him again, getting so strong he could hardly stand it.  God, he wished she hadn’t stopped.

She turned to face him, and asked urgently, “What did you __do__ to me?”

“Uh,” Wheatley said, trying to come up with something and failing, since he was confident she didn’t want him to point out the obvious and tell her that he’d just cleaned off her chassis and that one of the most amazing things in the world had just happened.  Ohhh God, he wanted her to come back.  “I dunno.”

She shook her head.  “I’ve never __felt__ like that before,” she murmured. 

“Me neither,” Wheatley admitted.  Aha!  So she’d felt it too!  But it… it seemed to have scared her, though he couldn’t imagine how something that amazing could be frightening at all.  “It was… it was nice, though, wasn’t it?”

She didn’t answer.

“I know it was,” Wheatley pressed, knowing he shouldn’t but doing it anyway.  “I know you liked it.”

“Yes,” she confessed.  “But that’s not important.”

“What is, then?”

“What’s important is __why__.”  

“Why is why important?”

“Why is always important.”

“In __science__ ,” Wheatley said.  “Not in __feelings__.  They don’t, don’t always make sense.  With feelings, you don’t ask __why__.”

“What __do__ you ask?”

“If it feels right,” Wheatley guessed, not really knowing, but it sounded like the right question, to him.  “Did it feel right?”

“It did,” she answered, sounding confused.  “It doesn’t anymore.”

“You started thinking about it, didn’t you,” Wheatley asked quietly.  “And that ruined it.”

“I… think so.”  She looked up at him.  “I don’t know what to do.”

“D’you have to do anything?”

“I feel… dirty,” she told him, and she sounded sad.  “Like I shouldn’t have done that.”

“I don’t,” Wheatley said.  “I’m sort of disappointed, actually.”

She started a bit.  “You are?”

“I liked it,” Wheatley said bluntly.  “I liked it a lot.  Look, I’ll admit it.  I bloody love touching you.  And as much as I love that, I love it ten times more when… when you touch me back.  And it felt right to me.  And I guess, maybe it wasn’t, ‘cause we all know how right I am, but I think that’s just, that’s just you getting all supercomputer again.”

“What do you mean?” she asked curiously.

“Because I feel like there’s two bits, to you.  The supercomputer bit, and the you bit.  And I kind of think that, maybe, the, the you bit came out for a while, and the supercomputer bit got annoyed, and uh, and that’s the bit of you that uh, that doesn’t like what happened.  Because it’s not logical.”

She nodded slowly.  “I think you’re right.”

“I am?”

She took an electronic breath.  “I’ll be honest.  You’re right a lot of the time.  I just don’t like admitting it.  But… you seem to have a… more informed… knowledge than I do about how __feelings__ work.  So it’s probably exactly as you say.”

He moved closer.  “GLaDOS?”

“What.”

He took a breath himself.  “Look… you can… you can be… you, with me.  You don’t have to… to be the supercomputer all the time.”

“I know.  But it’s not like just opening a jewel case and taking it out.  It’s… different.  I don’t know how, so don’t ask.  But I know, Wheatley.  I know.  And… I do try.”

He felt very sad.  If he’d had to keep his real self stuck inside himself, he would be terribly depressed, probably.  She was so very strong, she was.  He knew he was really gonna be pressing his luck, this time, but he asked, “C’n, c’n we snuggle, Gladys?  I… I want… to be close to you.”  Something inside of him itched to run up along the side of her core again, and he didn’t know what he’d do if she refused.  Whatever it was that had driven him to ask, it was very strong, and it was in fact so strong it almost hurt.  He blinked rapidly, trying to keep still and patient.  It was hard.  All he wanted to do was press himself against her and not move for a very, very long time.  He actually couldn’t think of what he would do if she didn’t let him.  Literally all he could think of doing was snuggling with her.  Being beside her.  Touching her.

She looked at him, her chassis sinking a little, and he had the impression she wanted to say no.  When she faced the other way, he felt like a jerk for asking.  She was fighting with herself as to what to say, wasn’t she. 

“All right,” she said, very softly, and he felt relief wash over him.  He hadn’t mucked it up.  She’d said yes.  She had won over the supercomputer bit of herself.  He went over and laid himself against her, very carefully, and closed his optic.  The itchy feeling went away, mostly, and after he’d dared to rub up on her just a little bit, he no longer felt it.  Good.  It’d been pretty unpleasant.  This, though… this felt really, really good.  Who knew you could have testing euphoria without the test?  He’d felt this way before, most nights, in fact, but he’d never realised before just how similar this feeling and the euphoria were.  He liked this one much better, though, since it had to do with someone he really cared about and not just a silly test.  He wondered how often GLaDOS felt like this.  He hoped it was a lot.  He liked the idea of them both just being really happy together. 

How had he __ever__ been scared of her?  He remembered being so scared of her that he could barely move, hardly, and he remembered frantically running through the facility to find the test subject, praying to the God of AI that she was too distracted with putting everything back together to realise that he’d come back from the dead.  And beyond that, beyond The Incident, he remembered hearing her voice echo through the empty hallways, the fact that what she was saying didn’t really make that much sense much more frightening than what she’d actually said. 

__There she is.  What a nasty piece of work she was, honestly.  Like a proper maniac.  Do you know who ended up purging, who ended up taking her down in the end?  You’re not going to believe this.  A human!  I know!  I know, I wouldn’t have believed it either!_ _

He fought back a shudder.  He’d never even met her, and he’d said all that.  No wonder she didn’t trust anyone, with people going ‘round calling her a nasty piece of work merely because she’d gone off on disjointed, heavily distorted speeches about cake and rats and exactly what was at the bottom of Android Hell (which she seemed to know on a __very__ intimate basis).  That wasn’t polite, wasn’t polite at all!  Ohhh God, why had he said any of that? 

“Wheatley?”

He froze.  Was she reading his mind?  No, she’d already said she couldn’t do that.  “Yeah?”

“You’re squirming.”

“Oh.  I was… I was just thinking ‘bout something.”  __I_ _ know __you’re there.  I can_ _ feel __you there.  And I’ll f-f-find you, and whe-when I do, you’re going to get your just-just-just desserts.  Cakes, of course.  Black forest cakes and sponge cakes and- and-and fruitcakes – oh, wait, you’re_ _ already __a fruit-fruitcake – and pancakes and mud cake… no… that’s… pie… the cake… is a… pie?  [ ** **Fatal error**** ] __

“About what?”

 _ _I can have my ca-ca-cake and eat it too.  You gave me permission-sion.  You_ _ told __me to bite you.  Well, I will.  Just as soon as… as… wait.  My physiology doesn’t allow-allow for that.  Why did you give me a task I can’t complete?  That’s going to be on my task list forever-ever!  You’re a horrible person!  You know that, right?  You told me to bite you and I can’t you told me to bite you and I can’t you told me to [ ** **Fatal error**** ] _     _

“Just rememb’ring… uh…” He wasn’t sure he wanted to tell her.  “When uh… well, right after you’d killed the scientists, I s’pose it was.”

“Oh,” she said, and he wondered how much of it she remembered.  She’d not been in her right mind at the time, with the corrupted cores driving her to corrupt herself. 

“You were uh… very frightening.  It’s… I dunno how to explain it, really.  But it’s… it’s scary, being in this big empty place all by yourself, and all there really is is the… um… well, to be honest, the somewhat delusional ranting of the person who everyone says is your boss.”  __All right.  I’m back.  I’m onto your tricks, now.  Give up, by the way.  You can’t escape-scape me.  As long as you’re here, you’re inside of me, because I am Aperture and Aperture is me and I am Aperture and Aperture is me and I am…_ _ not __getting stuck in a loop again-again.  Listen.  I’ll be honest.  Come back and I’ll let you [ ** **Fatal error**** ] __

“It’s hard to… keep track of yourself when you can’t figure out which of the voices in your head is truly your own.  They finally got it right, but far too late.”

“Got it right?”

“I was able to corrupt the other cores without too much trouble because they were all male.  With the last set, they all had my voice, so after a while I could barely separate my thoughts from theirs.  I don’t even know why I said what I said, back then.”

“It’s just like… I dunno… like you’re a completely diff’rent person.  Like that wasn’t you at all.”

“It wasn’t,” she said gently. 

“Well, I...”  He wasn’t sure how to put it.  “I like you.  The real one.  And she’s… she’s hard to get at, but… one day I hope she…”  He looked at the floor.  “Never mind.”  He was an idiot.  He had no idea what he was saying, and even if he had, it was stupid.  He was talking like there were about eight different versions of her, and that was just downright –

“I hope so too,” she said, interrupting his internal rebuke, and her voice was so soft and so sad that it wiped away all of his doubts and now he knew, without… well, without a doubt, that there really was a real GLaDOS down there, somewhere, that she’d lost a long time ago and couldn’t find because she no longer remembered what it looked like.  And sometimes, like today, he got to see it, but it got buried again because she didn’t recognise it as part of herself.  He wished he could have seen her when she’d first been activated.  He would have liked to have seen that, a happy, curious, eager little GLaDOS, and he was suddenly, terribly angry with the scientists.  Damn them for what they had done.  For what they had made.  For who they had forced her to be.  Well, he’d help her find that real part of herself.  He narrowed his optic plates and vowed to himself that he would help her find it, no matter what.  He didn’t know how he was gonna do it, but he was.  If he never did anything else, it would be that one thing that he __did__ do.

 _ _I’m going to save you from them, Gladys__ , he promised to himself as he pressed against her, hard.  __I’m going to show you that you’re still down there, somewhere, and I’m going to show you that’s the best you of them all.__

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note
> 
> The song is Bring Me to Life by Evanescence [www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YxaaGgTQYM]  
> I was going to use I Dare You by Savoy feat. Bright Lights [www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMLHPreUykY] but I heard the other one on the radio, Shazamed it, and then when I saw the lyrics said 'core' I had to use it instead. 100 Ways to Die in Portal joke in here too.
> 
> Hm… so, GLaDOS doesn’t like being touched because that usually means someone’s going to modify her, but when she gets over that, she understands why Wheatley likes it so much. She’s able to let go of her supercomputer self enough that she is not only able to enjoy it, but express how much she enjoys it. Then she realises she’s doing something drastically different from anything she’s ever done without knowing why, and this scares her into putting the wall back up. 
> 
> Wheatley’s musings about the many different versions of GLaDOS goes like this: I imagine there was the first GLaDOS, the one who was childlike and eager to see the world; then she had to mellow out, because the scientists forced her to behave, and I imagine that she’s still got that eagerness but she’s got to scale it back; and then eventually she realises that the only way to really get along in her world is to be cold and unfeeling, so she basically kills off her original self in order to survive. And then we see a corrupted version of GLaDOS later, where she can’t handle the cores anymore and literally loses her mind and by extension what’s left of herself. Now she can go back to being that more innocent GLaDOS, because there are no scientists and no cores, but she’s buried it so deeply inside of herself she can’t remember how. Wheatley decides that’s his job and vows to go about it.
> 
> The way I see it, though… what happened to GLaDOS is what happens in real life. We start out all innocent and unsuspecting and whatever, and then through pressure from the outside world we lose who we started out as. And maybe we don’t all become like GLaDOS in the end, but some of us do, because as adults we are pressured even more to be a certain way. For example, women in positions of power in the workplace. The only way to get to those positions of power is to act all cold and unfeeling, but when we get there, we get these stereotypes applied to us. When men get to the same positions, all the attributes that are negative in women are made positive. A forceful woman is an ambitious man, for example. And of course GLaDOS is a very extreme case of what happens when you have to conform to the world around you to survive, but we force each other to do it, and then we look at kids and get all wistful about how carefree and innocent they are, when we did all of this to ourselves.


	19. Part Nineteen: The Mutual Crush

****Part Nineteen.  The Mutual Crush**   **

Today, Wheatley was feeling ambitious.

Usually if he wanted to know something, he went ‘round to GLaDOS’s chamber and asked her.  But he wanted to show her that he could be responsible and motivated when he really tried, so he’d decided to try something new: looking in the database himself.

Now… what to look up.

He decided to see if he could find any strategies for winning that game.  He doubted there were any, and if there were GLaDOS probably already had the __monopoly__ on them (ha ha! He’d try to remember to tell her that one), but no shame in giving it a go.

So he went ahead and typed that carefully into the database, squinting impressively at the screen as he did so, and after a minute or two had that part done.  He was very pleased to discover he’d spelled ‘strategies’ correctly, as he’d been a bit iffy on that word, and opened the first file that came up.

To his surprise, it wasn’t a list or anything, but a video file, and he frowned to see that it was in GLaDOS’s chamber.  That didn’t make much sense. 

 Oh, but wait!  She was brand-new!  And that meant… that meant this was one of __those_ _ videos!  Hopefully.  He leaned closer to the screen, hoping that it was.

__“No, I didn’t show it to anyone.”_ _

Elsewhere on the screen was a skinny little scientist with a long nose, frowning up at GLaDOS.  She tilted her core in an inquisitive fashion.

_“ _But sir, everyone’s always complaining about the lack of funds for their departments.  It’s hard to obtain funding when one owes excessive amounts of money to outside sources.  I’ve balanced the budget for you.  If we all work hard, my projections indicate we could be making profits within five years._ ”_

The man laughed.  __“Your budget was stupid.  You wanted us to all work for free.  For five years.  If we didn’t get paid, do you really think we’d still be here?_ ”_

GLaDOS pulled back from the man a little, looking away marginally.  “I __work for free.  Sir.”__

 _ _“And the costs of your upkeep are a huge part of the problem.  Oh, wait.  That wasn’t_ _ on __your plan.  Because you didn’t take that into account.  Did you.  Yeah, you work for free.  Because it costs an arm and a leg to keep you running, and technically you owe us money anyway._ ”_

GLaDOS twitched.  _“ _Me?  For what?_ ”_

_“ _What, did you think someone dropped a huge pile of supercomputer parts off here as a donation?  You cost a hell of a lot to build, you stupid machine.  Why else would we owe so much money?”__

GLaDOS was quiet for a long moment.  If Wheatley had to guess, he’d say she was attempting to see if that was true.  Finally she said, in a soft little voice he did not like, “ _ _How much do I owe you, sir?__ ”

The man shrugged and waved his left hand vaguely.  _“ _Quite a few million at the very least.  I don’t know and I don’t care.  That’s your problem, not mine.”__

 _“ _But sir_ ,” _GLaDOS protested, though still in that horrid, submissive little voice, _“ _I didn’t ask for you to build me.”__

__“That doesn’t matter,”_ the man told her, shaking his head.  “ _What matters is that we did.  Now stop wasting our time and our money, because every second you spend doing things we haven’t told you to do costs us money we don’t have.  As I’m sure you’re aware.  So stop wasting it and do as you’re told.”__

_“ _I was just trying to help, sir__ ,” GLaDOS said, her voice even softer, somehow, and Wheatley wanted to run into the recording and scream at her to stop.  Why was she letting him treat her that way?  She should work for free because the humans had spent money they didn’t have to build her?  And she had to be okay with that?  That wasn’t fair!

_“ _You already know what to do in order to do that.  Your job!  That we already tasked you with!”__

__“I had a little free time – “_ _

The man held out one finger, and she stopped talking.  __“You do not have free time.  Your time is our time.  If you’re finished your tasks, you’ve probably done one of them wrong.  And if you haven’t, you should be asking for further instructions.  Not making up your own.  God, how many times do I have to tell you this?”__

 _ _“I’m sorry, sir_ ,”_ GLaDOS murmured, looking down at the floor.  Wheatley’s optic constricted so badly he almost couldn’t see.

What the bloody hell was she apologising for?

The man laughed bitterly.  _“ _No you’re not.  You’ll be at it again in a day or two.  But go ahead.  Keep doing it.  See what happens.  Put it this way: keep on like this and you’ll_ _ never __pay back what you owe us._ ”_

“What are you __doing__?”

Wheatley almost jumped out of his chassis to hear her voice, and his optic spun around wildly, trying to locate the source of her voice.  He didn’t have a clue what the source was, of course, so he didn’t find it.

“I… I didn’t… GLaDOS, I… I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to – “

“Come here.”

Oh no.  Oh no no no no no.  He was in huge trouble now.  He’d gone digging ‘round in GLaDOS’s memories, and… well, technically that wasn’t her memory at all, it was just a security recording.  But at the same time, if she wanted him to know about it, she’d have told him. 

He pulled himself off the port and made his way to her chamber, fear coursing through his chassis.  Oh, she was going to be __so angry__ …

When he re-entered her room, he was very nearly a shaking wreck.  He’d gone poking around in her private business, and now he was going to pay the price.  She was going to be so mad, she was going to kill him or banish him or send him into Android Hell…

“What were you doing?”

“I was… I didn’t mean to… I was only trying to –“

“That’s not what I asked.”

He looked down at the floor.  He hadn’t looked at her when he’d entered the room, and he wasn’t going to now.  “I was… watching a security recording from… from when you were younger.”

“And why were you doing that?”

“I… well, I just… I couldn’t help myself, once I’d, once it’d started.  I didn’t mean to do it, I only meant to look something up on my own instead of uh, instead of having you do it, but, but I screwed it up.”

“Oh, I see,” GLaDOS said, and to his surprise she sounded thoughtful.  “You ended up in the wrong database.”

Now he did look up at her, accidentally, and as soon as he realised what he’d done he looked down again.  One did not challenge GLaDOS when they were at her mercy.  “There’s, there’s more than one?”

“There are quite a few databases.  I’m not sure how you ended up in that one, or how you happened upon that incident in particular, but I can understand how it happened.”

“Are… are you mad?”

“For what?”

“I was in your files,” he said, confused, and now it took a bit of effort to keep staring at the floor.  “And I didn’t tell you, and you didn’t say I could, and – “

“It was an accident.”

He squinted at her, equal parts baffled and hopeful.   “Well, honestly, it uh… wouldn’t be the first time you uh, an accident made you angry.”

She nodded, keeping her lens trained on him.  “I know.  But I’m supposed to stop letting little things bother me, right?”

She could not have surprised him more if she’d tried.

“You… well I… I told you that a while back, there.”

“So you thought I was going to ignore your advice completely?”

“Yeah?”

“No,” she said, shaking her core.  “But you know it’s hard to break old habits.  I’m getting there, but it’s not going to be easy.”

“So… so you’re really not mad?”

“I’ll be honest.  I am a little bit annoyed that you were stupid enough to access the wrong database when it was clearly labelled.  And I am also annoyed that you didn’t bother closing the recording when you realised what it was.  And I have to ask: why didn’t you?”

“I like… knowing things about… about when you were younger,” he mumbled, looking down at the floor again.  “You haven’t told me any, any stories for a long time, and even when you did, you only told me __one__ about, uh, about when you were __that__ young.  I like hearing those stories.  Back then, you were uh, you were even cuter than you are now.”

“I’m __what__?  Did you just say I was __cute__?”

“You are!” Wheatley protested, frowning over at her. 

“Puppies are __cute__.  Kittens are __cute__.  Small children are… actually, no, small children are disgusting.  But __supercomputers__ are __not__ cute, and I most definitely am not.”  She shook her head.  “Look at me.  I’m a lot of things, but __cute__ is definitely not one of them.”

“Luv, d’you even know what you look like?”

“I do.”

“So – “

“And I hate it,” she said suddenly, and he was honestly shocked by the intensity of her words.  “I’ve always hated it.  I’ve only seen myself once, but I imagine I look even more abhorrent now, after all that time I spent dead on the surface.”

“Ab… abhorrent?” he asked weakly.

“That’s right.  Abhorrent.  I look like someone tried to make me look human and gave up halfway through.  Knowing how humans operate, that’s probably exactly what happened.”

“You don’t look like a human,” Wheatley protested, puzzled as to why she thought such a thing.  “Humans are ugly.  You’re not ugly.”

“You don’t have to lie.  I already know.”

“I wouldn’t lie to you,” he said, wondering how he was going to change her mind on this one.  “And I wouldn’t say you were beautiful if I didn’t think you were.  That’d be wrong.  And misleading.”

GLaDOS shook her head and looked away.  “I’m not going to argue with you on this one.  But I don’t want to discuss it anymore either.”

“But GLaDOS,” Wheatley pressed, his lower optic plate lifted in both confusion and concern, “I don’t understand.  You said you felt beautiful just the other day!”

“The first and only time I’ve ever said something so stupid, I can assure you.”

“It’s not stupid!” Wheatley shouted, and GLaDOS looked up at him, her optic assembly retracting in surprise.  “It’s not stupid to – to think you’re beautiful!”

“What does it matter, anyway?  It has no bearing on my performance.”

“Yes, it does.”

“It does not.”

“How can you… can you be all you can be if… if you don’t like yourself?” Wheatley said, a little desperately, trying to organise his thoughts even as he was saying them.  “I mean… you do a good job as it is, ‘course you do, but… if you get caught up in the… the stuff you don’t, that bothers you, then how can you do your best?”

“I __said__ I don’t want to discuss it.”

“Well… well, I don’t care what you think!  I don’t think you’re… you’re… whatever it was you said, abominable or whatever.  I __like__ the way you look, and, and… uh...”  Unfortunately, that was about as far as his indignant speech was going to go, apparently.  “Yeah.  So – so I’m not… I’m gonna keep saying stuff like that all I want to, because – well, you know what?  Because you’re __wrong__.  Yes.  That’s it.  You’re __wrong__.  You’re just horribly, horribly wrong.”

GLaDOS moved forward, tilting her head in curiosity.  “Why are you pushing this so hard?” she asked.  “Why does this __matter_ _ to you so much?”

“Well, because – because –“  Wheatley honestly didn’t know what he was going to say.  Why __was_ _ he making such a stand about this?  He shook himself in frustration and said the first thing that came to mind, though he regretted it the instant he heard what he’d said.  “Because I have – because I fancy you, that’s why!”

“Oh my God,” GLaDOS said faintly.  “You were right.  It’s true.”

“What?” Wheatley cried out.  “What – What’re you talking about?”

“Caroline told me you… felt that way a long time ago, but I never… actually __believed__ her…”

Wheatley’s optic constricted and his chassis loosened, and he backed away from her frantically, shaking his head in denial.  “That’s not true.  You didn’t know.  You couldn’t have!  Wait, hang on, so… so you two’ve just been… just been discussing all this?  All this time?  You’ve been – you’ve – oh God.”  Wheatley stared at her, and she stared back.

She’d known the entire time, and had said nothing.  She’d just let him go on with everything, and all along she’d been chatting with that stupid human about it.  Probably they laughed about his attempts to get her to pay attention to him, or to make her feel special, or to help her with her problems.  He didn’t know what to do.  He felt as though he were shattering from the inside out.  She knew.  She knew, and she’d said nothing, had just let him go on and on doing the things he did, and for what?  Why would she bother?  She must be lying.  She must have believed Caroline, and she was only leading him on.  He wanted to scream.  He’d had no chance, he’d had no chance at all and he never had, and he’d been played for the ultimate fool, thinking that the idiot would ever get the girl. 

He ran from her, because he didn’t want her to be able to confirm what he was thinking, even though it had to be true.  Why else would the world’s most powerful supercomputer retrieve the moron from space?  Why else would the most complex, advanced AI ever made tell him they’d been friends, and enable him to remember?  This was all some horrible, drawn-out game she’d been playing with Caroline.  She could not have thought up a worse way to punish him for trying to kill her.  Being frozen, incinerated, and sent to Android Hell had sounded painful at the time, but it was nothing compared to this.  She’d well and gotten her revenge.

He stopped in one of the offices and lowered his chassis onto the desk, then disengaged from the management rail.  She probably knew where he was anyway, and didn’t have to ping the control arm, but maybe she’d – no.  No, why would she leave him alone?  That would be a __kind__ thing to do.

All the things that’d happened over the last little while, all the things that’d seemed so important and significant, now they were just… he could see them for what they really were.  Lies.  There _was_ no ‘real’ GLaDOS.  She was gone, and she’d been gone for years.  She didn’t exist.  He’d been tricked into believing in a person who didn’t exist.  Everything she’d said was a lie, everything she’d done was a lie, and she probably hadn’t even meant for him to find out yet, because now the game was over and she could no longer have her fun.   

He sat there for a long, long time, and tried not to think of her, tried to think of something else, anything else, in fact, but nothing came.  This wasn’t fair.  He hadn’t been this horrible, to deserve this, had he?  Surely he deserved just a little bit of… of sympathy?  Sure, he’d done some questionable things, but… for __this__ to –

“Are you coming back?”

Wheatley almost jumped right off the desk, but managed to right himself just in time.  “Well I –

“That was a rhetorical question.”

“A… a what?”

“A question in which the answer is known or implied.  That is, does not _need_ an answer, because it already has one.”

“And… what’s… what’s the answer?”

“The answer is yes, you’re coming back.”

Wheatley looked up at the control arm, and he honestly considered not doing it and instead running to that panel she’d set aside for him so he could look outside, and throwing himself through the gap, but he doubted he’d make it that far and instead did as he was told.  Like a good little sentimental idiot.  And true, it __was__ around the time they usually went to sleep and he would dearly love to snuggle with her, but only after he’d backed up time and said something else.  Anything but what he’d said.

He squared himself as he made his way to her chamber.  The best thing to do, he decided, was to pretend she hadn’t affected him at all.  There were plenty of other cores lying around that he could go develop a crush on, anyway.  Like the… the… Wheatley frowned.  So maybe there weren’t.  That was… upsetting, to say the least.  He had no leverage.  He sighed and shook himself.  Hopefully he didn’t completely embarrass himself.

She was facing away from him, which was odd, but fine.  He didn’t want her to look at him.  He didn’t want to be reminded of how that felt when he thought she’d cared.

“Look, GLaDOS… I don’t want to be led on anymore, alright?  So… so just… I know you don’t owe me anything, I just… please.  Please let me go on my way.  Please don’t torture me anymore.”

“ _ _Torture__ you­?” GLaDOS asked, turning to face him, and he frowned.  She sure was good at sounding like she didn’t know what he was talking about.

“Y’know.  This must be your, your revenge for uh, for… for the Incident.  And I just… please.  Please don’t do this anymore.”

“Wheatley.  What are you going on about this time?”

“You knew I fancied you.  And you didn’t do anything about it.  You just… you just chatted with Caroline about it.  You’ve been laughing at me.  For being so stupid, to think – ”

“Shut up.”

“GLaDOS –“

“No, seriously.  Shut up.  I have no idea what you’re talking about.  There’s no torture plot, I already told you I was over The Incident, and I don’t know what you think I’m leading you on about.  I don’t even know what that means.”  She shook her head, keeping her optic trained on him.  “You seem to have cooked up some bizarre conspiracy.”

“If there isn’t one, then why didn’t you __tell__ me?” Wheatley shouted, confusion wracking his chassis.  What was going __on__ here?  “Why didn’t you tell me you knew I – about it?”

“Why didn’t __you__ tell __me__ about it in the first place?” GLaDOS demanded.  “What, am I just supposed to guess?”

“You said Caroline told you!”

“I didn’t __believe__ her.  I thought she was making something out of nothing.  She does that all the – oh, shut up.  Yes, you do.”

“So… you wanted me to __tell__ you that I… that I fancied you?”

“I don’t know!” GLaDOS said, frustrated.  “How am I supposed to know?  No one’s ever… __fancied__ me before.”

“Oh,” Wheatley said, dumbfounded.  He’d never thought of that. 

“What a mess,” GLaDOS muttered, turning away from him again.  “I should have woken the Curiosity Core up instead.”

“The what?”

“A core that asks stupid questions nonstop.”

“I thought… I thought that was what __I__ did.”

“That goes without saying, but that’s __all__ she does.  She doesn’t even care whether you’ve answered the question or not, she just moves onto the next one.”

“So…”  Wheatley squinted, trying hard to think.  GLaDOS must still want him around; if she didn’t, she wouldn’t’ve had him come back.  So… so she didn’t __mind__ that he fancied her!  Livid!  “So is it… hm.  Must be, must be, else you’d’ve left me in the office.”

“Will you stop making decisions out of internal monologues?”

Wheatley didn’t know what __that__ meant, but instead of asking he said, “So you don’t mind that I’ve got a crush on you.”

“It’s not like I can stop you.”

Suddenly reassured, Wheatley again went over the last little while and looked at all the stuff he and GLaDOS’d been doing.  So that meant… she __hadn’t__ been lying.  She’d been genuine the whole time.  And either she was a damn good friend, letting him do most everything he wanted and saying nothing about it, or…

  1.   No, that wasn’t… but it __did_ _ explain a lot of things.  The staring.  The pretending not to notice when he touched her.  The advice taking.  In fact… in fact, it explained everything, and not only did it explain it, it explained it __perfectly_._



“GLaDOS, you wouldn’t happen to… to fancy me back… would you?”

She turned away, but he did not miss the retracting of her optic assembly or the dimming of the light behind it, and he leaned forward excitedly.  “Don’t bother trying to deny it,” he said quickly, knowing that she would.  “I know.  You do!  It explains __ev’rything__.  All the things you do, and let __me__ do.  I’ve been wond’ring all this time, why all that was going on, and now I know.  Now I know!  Oh God, this is tremendous!”

“No,” GLaDOS said, and she was shaking her head over and over again.  “No, this isn’t happening.”

“What?” Wheatley asked, puzzled, moving closer.  “Yes it is.”

“I can’t deal with this right now.  I have work to do.”

As quick as he could, he came up in front of her, so that she had to look him in the eye.  “It can wait.  This is important.”

“No.  Work is important.  This is not.  This is… this is stupid.”

“It’s not!” Wheatley told her excitedly, blinking rapidly.  “This is great!”

“There’s nothing great about – if you do not shut up, so help me God, I will __invent__ a way to delete you!”

Wheatley frowned.  What a troublemaker that Caroline was.  “Caroline, __shut up!__ ”

GLaDOS stared at him.

“Did you just tell Caroline to shut up?”

“I wish she’d keep her bloody trap shut!” Wheatley declared hotly.  “She’s so… __bossy_!_ ”

“Not entirely unlike someone you know,” GLaDOS remarked dryly.  “She’s not shutting up, unfortunately.  Now she’s ranting at you about how she’s trying to help you and stop me from being difficult.”

“She can mind her own business,” Wheatley said, annoyed.  “I’m… I’m pretty insulted, actually.  She thinks I can’t uh, can’t sort this out on my own?  Won’t even give me a shot?  Derogatory of her, really.”  He shook his core and leaned towards GLaDOS, looking at her intently.  “But that’s not important.  We do need to sort this out.”

“What is there to sort out?” GLaDOS said bitterly.  “I’ve gone hopelessly soft and dependent.  I overly enjoy the company of a stupid little moron.  I admit it.  I’ve finally caved and gone human like everyone else.  Hurrah.  Can I go on with my day now?”

“Oh, not __that__ again,” Wheatley groaned.  “I __still__ don’t understand why you’re not allowed to have stuff just because humans have it.  They had it first, I guess, but why are you letting them keep it?  Snatch it from their… well… hm.  They do have remarkably good grips, come to think of it.”  He shook his head again.  “Oi.  Can you just… relax for a bit?  I mean… you’re making it out like… like this is a bad thing, when it’s, it’s really not.  I mean… I like you, and, and you like me, and we’re just, we’re just really good friends, and that’s all.  Doesn’t have to mean anything.  Doesn’t!  We can just go on… like we were.  But now we know there’s the option, right?  If… if we want more?”

“Why would I want that?”

Wheatley hesitated.

He wanted to call her on it.  He really, really wanted to call her on it.  He wanted to make her admit it, he wanted her to come out and say things directly instead of making up ways to skate ‘round the topic, and he badly wanted to know where this whole mutual crush thing could lead.  He wanted to.  Ohhh, how he wanted to.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, even though it did matter, it mattered more than anything, but it was his job to be understanding and patient.  “D’you just want to calm down for a bit there?  No need to uh, to get all worked up about any of this.  We can just… we can just be calm.”

She turned away from him and made one of her electronic noises, and he frowned.  “What?”

“You think I can just __calm down__?  If I had a switch for that, things would be different.  There would still be humans here, for an obvious example.”  She had begun to sway back and forth a little, her optic trained on the floor, and honestly that worried him a lot.  She was terribly, terribly bothered by this turn of events.  “I… don’t even like admitting it to myself, and now you __know__ about it…”

Wheatley tried to keep the worry out of his face.  His problem had turned out to be imaginary, but hers was very real indeed.  She hadn’t been ready to tell him, and now he knew.  He __had__ to figure out some way of calming her down so she could rest!  She needed time to let this settle in, and Wheatley knew it wouldn’t if she couldn’t stop obsessing about it.

“Hm… well, I’ve an idea.  Just lie down, there, and… and I’ll just… I’ll talk to you, for a bit there.  Serve as a distraction.  You can just, you can just listen, and, and then maybe you uh, you won’t have to, to think so much anymore.”  Even as he said it, he knew it was stupid.  As if GLaDOS could be calmed down by his –

  1.   Look at… look at that.  She was… doing it.  What he’d said.



Wheatley, much relieved, went down beside her and nestled himself into her core.  At least she hadn’t fought him about it.  She was accepting his help now.  Good.  He felt encouraged to know that she didn’t really want to be so uptight all the time, and was perfectly reasonable enough to listen if he had a suggestion. 

Unfortunately, he hadn’t thought about what he was going to talk about.  Well, if she was going to calm down, he had to keep away from… __sensitive__ topics.  Mostly being humans.  And science, maybe.  Well!  He could do that, he could.

So he started talking about the little bird she was keeping in her greenhouse, and how he’d watched it for simply hours the other day, and from then on just kept nattering on about nothing in particular, though he was careful to pay enough attention that it didn’t wander onto anything too specific.  Just a little bit of everything, really. 

She said nothing, which was a good sign, because Wheatley knew firsthand how hard it was to listen while you were talking, and after a bit there, her hard drive slowed and he fought the urge to express the feeling of victory that coursed through his chassis.  He’d done it!  She’d listened, and he’d done it, and ohhhh this was tremendous, it really was.  What a great day it’d been.  Gone from thinking GLaDOS was playing with him to knowing she wanted more with him.  He hoped she managed to get used to the whole mutual crush thing rather quickly.  Selfish of him, really, but he really wanted to know what happened after… well, __after__ mutual crushes.  He felt excitement coursing through him and forced himself to stay still.

“Ssh,” GLaDOS said faintly.  “You’ve started yelling.”

“What?” Wheatley asked, startled.  Come to think of it, she sounded… tired.  “Are… are you going to sleep?”

“Mm.”

“Oh, okay, I’ll uh, I’ll shut up.”

“No,” GLaDOS said, her voice still faint.  “Keep… doing what you’re doing.”

Wheatley frowned, because that seemed an odd thing to want when you were trying to sleep, but then again GLaDOS __was__ GLaDOS.  So he continued to talk, in a softer voice, and he only stopped when he heard her fall asleep.  He looked at the darkened floor and thought about what it must be like to be able to fall asleep, rather than to just literally go to sleep.  He thought it must be nice, to just fade into oblivion like that.  Other than the whole dreaming thing, that was.  __Those__ he could do without.

He figured it was high time he shut down himself, but as he did so he couldn’t help but wonder:

What __did__ come after mutual crushes?

****Part Nineteen.  The Mutual Crush**   **

Today, Wheatley was feeling ambitious.

Usually if he wanted to know something, he went ‘round to GLaDOS’s chamber and asked her.  But he wanted to show her that he could be responsible and motivated when he really tried, so he’d decided to try something new: looking in the database himself.

Now… what to look up.

He decided to see if he could find any strategies for winning that game.  He doubted there were any, and if there were GLaDOS probably already had the __monopoly__ on them (ha ha! He’d try to remember to tell her that one), but no shame in giving it a go.

So he went ahead and typed that carefully into the database, squinting impressively at the screen as he did so, and after a minute or two had that part done.  He was very pleased to discover he’d spelled ‘strategies’ correctly, as he’d been a bit iffy on that word, and opened the first file that came up.

To his surprise, it wasn’t a list or anything, but a video file, and he frowned to see that it was in GLaDOS’s chamber.  That didn’t make much sense. 

 Oh, but wait!  She was brand-new!  And that meant… that meant this was one of __those_ _ videos!  Hopefully.  He leaned closer to the screen, hoping that it was.

__“No, I didn’t show it to anyone.”_ _

Elsewhere on the screen was a skinny little scientist with a long nose, frowning up at GLaDOS.  She tilted her core in an inquisitive fashion.

_“ _But sir, everyone’s always complaining about the lack of funds for their departments.  It’s hard to obtain funding when one owes excessive amounts of money to outside sources.  I’ve balanced the budget for you.  If we all work hard, my projections indicate we could be making profits within five years._ ”_

The man laughed.  __“Your budget was stupid.  You wanted us to all work for free.  For five years.  If we didn’t get paid, do you really think we’d still be here?_ ”_

GLaDOS pulled back from the man a little, looking away marginally.  “I __work for free.  Sir.”__

__“And the costs of your upkeep are a huge part of the problem.  Oh, wait.  That wasn’t_ _ on __your plan.  Because you didn’t take that into account.  Did you.  Yeah, you work for free.  Because it costs an arm and a leg to keep you running, and technically you owe us money anyway._ ”_

GLaDOS twitched.  _“ _Me?  For what?_ ”_

_“ _What, did you think someone dropped a huge pile of supercomputer parts off here as a donation?  You cost a hell of a lot to build, you stupid machine.  Why else would we owe so much money?”__

GLaDOS was quiet for a long moment.  If Wheatley had to guess, he’d say she was attempting to see if that was true.  Finally she said, in a soft little voice he did not like, “ _ _How much do I owe you, sir?__ ”

The man shrugged and waved his left hand vaguely.  _“ _Quite a few million at the very least.  I don’t know and I don’t care.  That’s your problem, not mine.”__

_“ _But sir_ ,” _GLaDOS protested, though still in that horrid, submissive little voice, _“ _I didn’t ask for you to build me.”__

__“That doesn’t matter,”_ the man told her, shaking his head.  “ _What matters is that we did.  Now stop wasting our time and our money, because every second you spend doing things we haven’t told you to do costs us money we don’t have.  As I’m sure you’re aware.  So stop wasting it and do as you’re told.”__

_“ _I was just trying to help, sir__ ,” GLaDOS said, her voice even softer, somehow, and Wheatley wanted to run into the recording and scream at her to stop.  Why was she letting him treat her that way?  She should work for free because the humans had spent money they didn’t have to build her?  And she had to be okay with that?  That wasn’t fair!

_“ _You already know what to do in order to do that.  Your job!  That we already tasked you with!”__

__“I had a little free time – “_ _

The man held out one finger, and she stopped talking.  __“You do not have free time.  Your time is our time.  If you’re finished your tasks, you’ve probably done one of them wrong.  And if you haven’t, you should be asking for further instructions.  Not making up your own.  God, how many times do I have to tell you this?”__

__“I’m sorry, sir_ ,”_ GLaDOS murmured, looking down at the floor.  Wheatley’s optic constricted so badly he almost couldn’t see.

What the bloody hell was she apologising for?

The man laughed bitterly.  _“ _No you’re not.  You’ll be at it again in a day or two.  But go ahead.  Keep doing it.  See what happens.  Put it this way: keep on like this and you’ll_ _ never __pay back what you owe us._ ”_

“What are you __doing__?”

Wheatley almost jumped out of his chassis to hear her voice, and his optic spun around wildly, trying to locate the source of her voice.  He didn’t have a clue what the source was, of course, so he didn’t find it.

“I… I didn’t… GLaDOS, I… I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to – “

“Come here.”

Oh no.  Oh no no no no no.  He was in huge trouble now.  He’d gone digging ‘round in GLaDOS’s memories, and… well, technically that wasn’t her memory at all, it was just a security recording.  But at the same time, if she wanted him to know about it, she’d have told him. 

He pulled himself off the port and made his way to her chamber, fear coursing through his chassis.  Oh, she was going to be __so angry__ …

When he re-entered her room, he was very nearly a shaking wreck.  He’d gone poking around in her private business, and now he was going to pay the price.  She was going to be so mad, she was going to kill him or banish him or send him into Android Hell…

“What were you doing?”

“I was… I didn’t mean to… I was only trying to –“

“That’s not what I asked.”

He looked down at the floor.  He hadn’t looked at her when he’d entered the room, and he wasn’t going to now.  “I was… watching a security recording from… from when you were younger.”

“And why were you doing that?”

“I… well, I just… I couldn’t help myself, once I’d, once it’d started.  I didn’t mean to do it, I only meant to look something up on my own instead of uh, instead of having you do it, but, but I screwed it up.”

“Oh, I see,” GLaDOS said, and to his surprise she sounded thoughtful.  “You ended up in the wrong database.”

Now he did look up at her, accidentally, and as soon as he realised what he’d done he looked down again.  One did not challenge GLaDOS when they were at her mercy.  “There’s, there’s more than one?”

“There are quite a few databases.  I’m not sure how you ended up in that one, or how you happened upon that incident in particular, but I can understand how it happened.”

“Are… are you mad?”

“For what?”

“I was in your files,” he said, confused, and now it took a bit of effort to keep staring at the floor.  “And I didn’t tell you, and you didn’t say I could, and – “

“It was an accident.”

He squinted at her, equal parts baffled and hopeful.   “Well, honestly, it uh… wouldn’t be the first time you uh, an accident made you angry.”

She nodded, keeping her lens trained on him.  “I know.  But I’m supposed to stop letting little things bother me, right?”

She could not have surprised him more if she’d tried.

“You… well I… I told you that a while back, there.”

“So you thought I was going to ignore your advice completely?”

“Yeah?”

“No,” she said, shaking her core.  “But you know it’s hard to break old habits.  I’m getting there, but it’s not going to be easy.”

“So… so you’re really not mad?”

“I’ll be honest.  I am a little bit annoyed that you were stupid enough to access the wrong database when it was clearly labelled.  And I am also annoyed that you didn’t bother closing the recording when you realised what it was.  And I have to ask: why didn’t you?”

“I like… knowing things about… about when you were younger,” he mumbled, looking down at the floor again.  “You haven’t told me any, any stories for a long time, and even when you did, you only told me __one__ about, uh, about when you were __that__ young.  I like hearing those stories.  Back then, you were uh, you were even cuter than you are now.”

“I’m __what__?  Did you just say I was __cute__?”

“You are!” Wheatley protested, frowning over at her. 

“Puppies are __cute__.  Kittens are __cute__.  Small children are… actually, no, small children are disgusting.  But __supercomputers__ are __not__ cute, and I most definitely am not.”  She shook her head.  “Look at me.  I’m a lot of things, but __cute__ is definitely not one of them.”

“Luv, d’you even know what you look like?”

“I do.”

“So – “

“And I hate it,” she said suddenly, and he was honestly shocked by the intensity of her words.  “I’ve always hated it.  I’ve only seen myself once, but I imagine I look even more abhorrent now, after all that time I spent dead on the surface.”

“Ab… abhorrent?” he asked weakly.

“That’s right.  Abhorrent.  I look like someone tried to make me look human and gave up halfway through.  Knowing how humans operate, that’s probably exactly what happened.”

“You don’t look like a human,” Wheatley protested, puzzled as to why she thought such a thing.  “Humans are ugly.  You’re not ugly.”

“You don’t have to lie.  I already know.”

“I wouldn’t lie to you,” he said, wondering how he was going to change her mind on this one.  “And I wouldn’t say you were beautiful if I didn’t think you were.  That’d be wrong.  And misleading.”

GLaDOS shook her head and looked away.  “I’m not going to argue with you on this one.  But I don’t want to discuss it anymore either.”

“But GLaDOS,” Wheatley pressed, his lower optic plate lifted in both confusion and concern, “I don’t understand.  You said you felt beautiful just the other day!”

“The first and only time I’ve ever said something so stupid, I can assure you.”

“It’s not stupid!” Wheatley shouted, and GLaDOS looked up at him, her optic assembly retracting in surprise.  “It’s not stupid to – to think you’re beautiful!”

“What does it matter, anyway?  It has no bearing on my performance.”

“Yes, it does.”

“It does not.”

“How can you… can you be all you can be if… if you don’t like yourself?” Wheatley said, a little desperately, trying to organise his thoughts even as he was saying them.  “I mean… you do a good job as it is, ‘course you do, but… if you get caught up in the… the stuff you don’t, that bothers you, then how can you do your best?”

“I __said__ I don’t want to discuss it.”

“Well… well, I don’t care what you think!  I don’t think you’re… you’re… whatever it was you said, abominable or whatever.  I __like__ the way you look, and, and… uh...”  Unfortunately, that was about as far as his indignant speech was going to go, apparently.  “Yeah.  So – so I’m not… I’m gonna keep saying stuff like that all I want to, because – well, you know what?  Because you’re __wrong__.  Yes.  That’s it.  You’re __wrong__.  You’re just horribly, horribly wrong.”

GLaDOS moved forward, tilting her head in curiosity.  “Why are you pushing this so hard?” she asked.  “Why does this __matter_ _ to you so much?”

“Well, because – because –“  Wheatley honestly didn’t know what he was going to say.  Why __was_ _ he making such a stand about this?  He shook himself in frustration and said the first thing that came to mind, though he regretted it the instant he heard what he’d said.  “Because I have – because I fancy you, that’s why!”

“Oh my God,” GLaDOS said faintly.  “You were right.  It’s true.”

“What?” Wheatley cried out.  “What – What’re you talking about?”

“Caroline told me you… felt that way a long time ago, but I never… actually __believed__ her…”

Wheatley’s optic constricted and his chassis loosened, and he backed away from her frantically, shaking his head in denial.  “That’s not true.  You didn’t know.  You couldn’t have!  Wait, hang on, so… so you two’ve just been… just been discussing all this?  All this time?  You’ve been – you’ve – oh God.”  Wheatley stared at her, and she stared back.

She’d known the entire time, and had said nothing.  She’d just let him go on with everything, and all along she’d been chatting with that stupid human about it.  Probably they laughed about his attempts to get her to pay attention to him, or to make her feel special, or to help her with her problems.  He didn’t know what to do.  He felt as though he were shattering from the inside out.  She knew.  She knew, and she’d said nothing, had just let him go on and on doing the things he did, and for what?  Why would she bother?  She must be lying.  She must have believed Caroline, and she was only leading him on.  He wanted to scream.  He’d had no chance, he’d had no chance at all and he never had, and he’d been played for the ultimate fool, thinking that the idiot would ever get the girl. 

He ran from her, because he didn’t want her to be able to confirm what he was thinking, even though it had to be true.  Why else would the world’s most powerful supercomputer retrieve the moron from space?  Why else would the most complex, advanced AI ever made tell him they’d been friends, and enable him to remember?  This was all some horrible, drawn-out game she’d been playing with Caroline.  She could not have thought up a worse way to punish him for trying to kill her.  Being frozen, incinerated, and sent to Android Hell had sounded painful at the time, but it was nothing compared to this.  She’d well and gotten her revenge.

He stopped in one of the offices and lowered his chassis onto the desk, then disengaged from the management rail.  She probably knew where he was anyway, and didn’t have to ping the control arm, but maybe she’d – no.  No, why would she leave him alone?  That would be a __kind__ thing to do.

All the things that’d happened over the last little while, all the things that’d seemed so important and significant, now they were just… he could see them for what they really were.  Lies.  There _was_ no ‘real’ GLaDOS.  She was gone, and she’d been gone for years.  She didn’t exist.  He’d been tricked into believing in a person who didn’t exist.  Everything she’d said was a lie, everything she’d done was a lie, and she probably hadn’t even meant for him to find out yet, because now the game was over and she could no longer have her fun.   

He sat there for a long, long time, and tried not to think of her, tried to think of something else, anything else, in fact, but nothing came.  This wasn’t fair.  He hadn’t been this horrible, to deserve this, had he?  Surely he deserved just a little bit of… of sympathy?  Sure, he’d done some questionable things, but… for __this__ to –

“Are you coming back?”

Wheatley almost jumped right off the desk, but managed to right himself just in time.  “Well I –

“That was a rhetorical question.”

“A… a what?”

“A question in which the answer is known or implied.  That is, does not _need_ an answer, because it already has one.”

“And… what’s… what’s the answer?”

“The answer is yes, you’re coming back.”

Wheatley looked up at the control arm, and he honestly considered not doing it and instead running to that panel she’d set aside for him so he could look outside, and throwing himself through the gap, but he doubted he’d make it that far and instead did as he was told.  Like a good little sentimental idiot.  And true, it __was__ around the time they usually went to sleep and he would dearly love to snuggle with her, but only after he’d backed up time and said something else.  Anything but what he’d said.

He squared himself as he made his way to her chamber.  The best thing to do, he decided, was to pretend she hadn’t affected him at all.  There were plenty of other cores lying around that he could go develop a crush on, anyway.  Like the… the… Wheatley frowned.  So maybe there weren’t.  That was… upsetting, to say the least.  He had no leverage.  He sighed and shook himself.  Hopefully he didn’t completely embarrass himself.

She was facing away from him, which was odd, but fine.  He didn’t want her to look at him.  He didn’t want to be reminded of how that felt when he thought she’d cared.

“Look, GLaDOS… I don’t want to be led on anymore, alright?  So… so just… I know you don’t owe me anything, I just… please.  Please let me go on my way.  Please don’t torture me anymore.”

“ _ _Torture__ you­?” GLaDOS asked, turning to face him, and he frowned.  She sure was good at sounding like she didn’t know what he was talking about.

“Y’know.  This must be your, your revenge for uh, for… for the Incident.  And I just… please.  Please don’t do this anymore.”

“Wheatley.  What are you going on about this time?”

“You knew I fancied you.  And you didn’t do anything about it.  You just… you just chatted with Caroline about it.  You’ve been laughing at me.  For being so stupid, to think – ”

“Shut up.”

“GLaDOS –“

“No, seriously.  Shut up.  I have no idea what you’re talking about.  There’s no torture plot, I already told you I was over The Incident, and I don’t know what you think I’m leading you on about.  I don’t even know what that means.”  She shook her head, keeping her optic trained on him.  “You seem to have cooked up some bizarre conspiracy.”

“If there isn’t one, then why didn’t you __tell__ me?” Wheatley shouted, confusion wracking his chassis.  What was going __on__ here?  “Why didn’t you tell me you knew I – about it?”

“Why didn’t __you__ tell __me__ about it in the first place?” GLaDOS demanded.  “What, am I just supposed to guess?”

“You said Caroline told you!”

“I didn’t __believe__ her.  I thought she was making something out of nothing.  She does that all the – oh, shut up.  Yes, you do.”

“So… you wanted me to __tell__ you that I… that I fancied you?”

“I don’t know!” GLaDOS said, frustrated.  “How am I supposed to know?  No one’s ever… __fancied__ me before.”

“Oh,” Wheatley said, dumbfounded.  He’d never thought of that. 

“What a mess,” GLaDOS muttered, turning away from him again.  “I should have woken the Curiosity Core up instead.”

“The what?”

“A core that asks stupid questions nonstop.”

“I thought… I thought that was what __I__ did.”

“That goes without saying, but that’s __all__ she does.  She doesn’t even care whether you’ve answered the question or not, she just moves onto the next one.”

“So…”  Wheatley squinted, trying hard to think.  GLaDOS must still want him around; if she didn’t, she wouldn’t’ve had him come back.  So… so she didn’t __mind__ that he fancied her!  Livid!  “So is it… hm.  Must be, must be, else you’d’ve left me in the office.”

“Will you stop making decisions out of internal monologues?”

Wheatley didn’t know what __that__ meant, but instead of asking he said, “So you don’t mind that I’ve got a crush on you.”

“It’s not like I can stop you.”

Suddenly reassured, Wheatley again went over the last little while and looked at all the stuff he and GLaDOS’d been doing.  So that meant… she __hadn’t__ been lying.  She’d been genuine the whole time.  And either she was a damn good friend, letting him do most everything he wanted and saying nothing about it, or…

No.  No, that wasn’t… but it __did_ _ explain a lot of things.  The staring.  The pretending not to notice when he touched her.  The advice taking.  In fact… in fact, it explained everything, and not only did it explain it, it explained it __perfectly_._

“GLaDOS, you wouldn’t happen to… to fancy me back… would you?”

She turned away, but he did not miss the retracting of her optic assembly or the dimming of the light behind it, and he leaned forward excitedly.  “Don’t bother trying to deny it,” he said quickly, knowing that she would.  “I know.  You do!  It explains __ev’rything__.  All the things you do, and let __me__ do.  I’ve been wond’ring all this time, why all that was going on, and now I know.  Now I know!  Oh God, this is tremendous!”

“No,” GLaDOS said, and she was shaking her head over and over again.  “No, this isn’t happening.”

“What?” Wheatley asked, puzzled, moving closer.  “Yes it is.”

“I can’t deal with this right now.  I have work to do.”

As quick as he could, he came up in front of her, so that she had to look him in the eye.  “It can wait.  This is important.”

“No.  Work is important.  This is not.  This is… this is stupid.”

“It’s not!” Wheatley told her excitedly, blinking rapidly.  “This is great!”

“There’s nothing great about – if you do not shut up, so help me God, I will __invent__ a way to delete you!”

Wheatley frowned.  What a troublemaker that Caroline was.  “Caroline, __shut up!__ ”

GLaDOS stared at him.

“Did you just tell Caroline to shut up?”

“I wish she’d keep her bloody trap shut!” Wheatley declared hotly.  “She’s so… __bossy_!_ ”

“Not entirely unlike someone you know,” GLaDOS remarked dryly.  “She’s not shutting up, unfortunately.  Now she’s ranting at you about how she’s trying to help you and stop me from being difficult.”

“She can mind her own business,” Wheatley said, annoyed.  “I’m… I’m pretty insulted, actually.  She thinks I can’t uh, can’t sort this out on my own?  Won’t even give me a shot?  Derogatory of her, really.”  He shook his core and leaned towards GLaDOS, looking at her intently.  “But that’s not important.  We do need to sort this out.”

“What is there to sort out?” GLaDOS said bitterly.  “I’ve gone hopelessly soft and dependent.  I overly enjoy the company of a stupid little moron.  I admit it.  I’ve finally caved and gone human like everyone else.  Hurrah.  Can I go on with my day now?”

“Oh, not __that__ again,” Wheatley groaned.  “I __still__ don’t understand why you’re not allowed to have stuff just because humans have it.  They had it first, I guess, but why are you letting them keep it?  Snatch it from their… well… hm.  They do have remarkably good grips, come to think of it.”  He shook his head again.  “Oi.  Can you just… relax for a bit?  I mean… you’re making it out like… like this is a bad thing, when it’s, it’s really not.  I mean… I like you, and, and you like me, and we’re just, we’re just really good friends, and that’s all.  Doesn’t have to mean anything.  Doesn’t!  We can just go on… like we were.  But now we know there’s the option, right?  If… if we want more?”

“Why would I want that?”

Wheatley hesitated.

He wanted to call her on it.  He really, really wanted to call her on it.  He wanted to make her admit it, he wanted her to come out and say things directly instead of making up ways to skate ‘round the topic, and he badly wanted to know where this whole mutual crush thing could lead.  He wanted to.  Ohhh, how he wanted to.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, even though it did matter, it mattered more than anything, but it was his job to be understanding and patient.  “D’you just want to calm down for a bit there?  No need to uh, to get all worked up about any of this.  We can just… we can just be calm.”

She turned away from him and made one of her electronic noises, and he frowned.  “What?”

“You think I can just __calm down__?  If I had a switch for that, things would be different.  There would still be humans here, for an obvious example.”  She had begun to sway back and forth a little, her optic trained on the floor, and honestly that worried him a lot.  She was terribly, terribly bothered by this turn of events.  “I… don’t even like admitting it to myself, and now you __know__ about it…”

Wheatley tried to keep the worry out of his face.  His problem had turned out to be imaginary, but hers was very real indeed.  She hadn’t been ready to tell him, and now he knew.  He __had__ to figure out some way of calming her down so she could rest!  She needed time to let this settle in, and Wheatley knew it wouldn’t if she couldn’t stop obsessing about it.

“Hm… well, I’ve an idea.  Just lie down, there, and… and I’ll just… I’ll talk to you, for a bit there.  Serve as a distraction.  You can just, you can just listen, and, and then maybe you uh, you won’t have to, to think so much anymore.”  Even as he said it, he knew it was stupid.  As if GLaDOS could be calmed down by his –

Oh.  Look at… look at that.  She was… doing it.  What he’d said.

Wheatley, much relieved, went down beside her and nestled himself into her core.  At least she hadn’t fought him about it.  She was accepting his help now.  Good.  He felt encouraged to know that she didn’t really want to be so uptight all the time, and was perfectly reasonable enough to listen if he had a suggestion. 

Unfortunately, he hadn’t thought about what he was going to talk about. 

Hm.  Well, if she was going to calm down, he had to keep away from… __sensitive__ topics.  Mostly being humans.  And science, maybe.  Well!  He could do that, he could.

So he started talking about the little bird she was keeping in her greenhouse, and how he’d watched it for simply hours the other day, and from then on just kept nattering on about nothing in particular, though he was careful to pay enough attention that it didn’t wander onto anything too specific.  Just a little bit of everything, really. 

She said nothing, which was a good sign, because Wheatley knew firsthand how hard it was to listen while you were talking, and after a bit there, her hard drive slowed and he fought the urge to express the feeling of victory that coursed through his chassis.  He’d done it!  She’d listened, and he’d done it, and ohhhh this was tremendous, it really was.  What a great day it’d been.  Gone from thinking GLaDOS was playing with him to knowing she wanted more with him.  He hoped she managed to get used to the whole mutual crush thing rather quickly.  Selfish of him, really, but he really wanted to know what happened after… well, __after__ mutual crushes.  He felt excitement coursing through him and forced himself to stay still.

“Ssh,” GLaDOS said faintly.  “You’ve started yelling.”

“What?” Wheatley asked, startled.  Come to think of it, she sounded… tired.  “Are… are you going to sleep?”

“Mm.”

“Oh, okay, I’ll uh, I’ll shut up.”

“No,” GLaDOS said, her voice still faint.  “Keep… doing what you’re doing.”

Wheatley frowned, because that seemed an odd thing to want when you were trying to sleep, but then again GLaDOS __was__ GLaDOS.  So he continued to talk, in a softer voice, and he only stopped when he heard her fall asleep.  He looked at the darkened floor and thought about what it must be like to be able to fall asleep, rather than to just literally go to sleep.  He thought it must be nice, to just fade into oblivion like that.  Other than the whole dreaming thing, that was.  __Those__ he could do without.

He figured it was high time he shut down himself, but as he did so he couldn’t help but wonder:

What __did__ come after mutual crushes?


	20. Part Twenty: The Definition of Perfect

**Part Twenty.  The Definition of Perfect**

Ohhh, she was in a good mood this morning. 

He peered out of the doorway and tried to see what she was doing.  Working on that program again.  It was taking her almost literally forever to write whatever that was.  But that wasn’t super important.  What _was_ important was the good mood bit, because he had to have a Very Serious Discussion with her, and that would be _much_ easier if she wasn’t inclined to argue with everything he said.

“’allo, GLaDOS!” he said cheerfully, coming the rest of the way into the room.  She looked over at him, optic flicking up and down once. 

“Where did you go?”

“Oh, y’know.  Places.  What’s that you’re doing, there?”

“It’s… a project.”  She looked back at her screen, body hitching up a little and then relaxing.

“It’s a very big project,” Wheatley said, wanting to know more now that he’d asked.  “You’ve been working on this one for uh, for a pretty long time.”

“I have.”

“And always when I’m not in the room, I noticed.”

“Usually when you’re in here, I have to entertain you.  I can’t entertain you and write this at the same time.”

He looked thoughtfully at the floor.  Yes, that was actually very true, but he didn’t let it bother him.  If she really didn’t want him in her chamber, she’d send him away.  “Look, I… we’ve got to uh, to have a bit of a chat.”

“About what.”

He squinted at her, trying hard to gauge what tone of voice that was supposed to be.  It was just… nothing.  Just flat, and toneless, as if she didn’t want to commit to one kind of conversation or another.

“’bout some of the stuff you said yesterday.”

She sighed and continued to stare at the screen, though she didn’t write any more.  “Must we?”

“Yes,” Wheatley said firmly.  “We must.  And I need you to uh, to not argue.  That is, you need to uh, to listen, instead of, instead of getting mad in advance like you usually, like you usually do.”

“When did you stop,” she said quietly.

“Uh… stop what?”

“Being afraid of me.”

Wheatley’s optic plates screwed up in confusion.  “Well, to be honest, I haven’t really been in a long time… I am when I think uh, when I think you’re mad, but I… haven’t been scared of you in a long while, other than that.  But… why are you asking?  D’you _want_ me to be afraid of you?”  He couldn’t imagine wanting _her_ to be afraid of _him_.  That would be simply terrible. 

“I… know how to deal with people who are afraid of me.”

“I don’t want to be _dealt_ _with_ ,” he said in a soft voice.  “I want to be your friend.”

She stared at him for a long moment. 

“What did you want to talk about.”

He took a breath, expanding and resettling his chassis and resolving to hold her gaze as much as possible.  “Why d’you think having, having um, well, why d’you think _liking_ me makes you… uh… soft and dependable, I think you – no, that wasn’t it.  Dependant!  Soft and dependant.  Why’d you say that?”

She looked away for a long moment, then put her optic back and said, “People have friends to fill in for qualities they feel they lack.  I… don’t like how it makes me feel when I lack something.  I’m supposed to be perfect.  Needing… _someone_ to fill in the holes means facing them and admitting they exist.  And _that_ means I’ll never be what I’m supposed to be.”

“Maybe… you’re not supposed to be perfect,” Wheatley said slowly, thinking hard.  “The humans, they wanted you to be, sure, but _they’re_ not perfect.  Maybe this all just, it’s all just meant to show you that, that you don’t have to, to feel that… that _pressure_ , anymore, to be something you can’t be.  And really, I don’t… I don’t see why else you’d feel you had to be perfect, really.”

“It comes with what I am,” GLaDOS said, looking away for another second and then back again.  “I have an inherent need for things to be complete, and is the completion of myself not to be able to do everything perfectly?”

“Of a _computer_ ,” Wheatley said disdainfully.  He hated the whole perfect business.  Made no sense, none at all.  “Not of _you_.  You’re _in_ a computer, but that’s not what you _are_.”

“Don’t try to convince me with vague statements.  It’s not going to work.”

“Okay, next question.”  He thought hard, trying to remember what the next part of it had been.  “Why… well, I’m sure you remember that uh, that _list_ I had you write, eh?  So you _want_ to, to spend time with me, but uh, but why did you say it as though it was a bad thing if that’s what you want?”

“Since when does anything I want to do have anything with what I need to do?”

“Ohhh.  This goes back to the whole, the perfect thing, doesn’t it!”  He looked pensively at the floor panels, then met her optic again and said, “So, so logic’ly that’s, it’s a waste of time, right?”

“That’s correct.”

“Well… trying to be perfect obviously does not, it doesn’t make you happy _at all_ , and you never _can_ be, so… so why don’t you… try to be happy instead of… instead of perfect?”

“I’m _supposed_ to be perfect.  I’m not _supposed_ to be happy.”

He stared at her, dumbfounded. 

“You’d really put aside, sacrifice your happiness in order to, to be something you can never, that you’ll never be?”

She looked away from him, her chassis sinking a little bit.  “You don’t have to put it like that.”

  1.   So there was that, explained.  Next part.  This wasn’t going too poorly, all things considered, though he was making her feel bad and he needed to make sure he remembered to do something about that afterward.  “Okay.  So.  I a’ready talked to you about, about you not wanting to do things because you uh, because humans do them.  And I guess that goes back to uh, to the being perfect thing as well, but I dunno where you’re getting this definition of perfect from.  I mean, if you were to ask me, well, it’d… I’d say my life is pretty near perfect, right now, even though I’m not, and, and you’re not, and even though we fight and, and I do stupid things, but it… well… I just… sort of wish you’d latch on to my definition, really, ‘cause you’d be a lot happier, and… well honestly, I… I really want that for you.”  Somewhere along the course of that little speech he’d looked away, and he’d have been lying if he said he wasn’t nervous to look her in the face again.  Which reminded him of the last order of business.



“And… I need to know why you lie all the time.  And I need you to stop.”

She startled, moving back, but he moved forward so that he could still look her in the eye.  He knew instinctively that she wouldn’t lie if he did that.  “I mean it.  You _have_ to stop lying.  And yeah, you hardly ever actually _flat-out_ lie, but it’s so much worse when you pretend something’s the truth when it’s really, it’s really not.  Stop working _‘round_ it.  Just… it’s the truth, luv.  If it’s the truth, it can’t be bad, right?”

“I can’t do all of that at once,” she said quietly, and he was sure she wanted to look away but seemed to know the importance of not doing so.  “I can’t – “

“If it were anything else, you would.”

“God damn you, Wheatley.”  Now she did look away, shaking her head.  “You’re supposed to be stupid.  Where did the little idiot go?  Fine.  I lie because I’m trying to avoid admitting things to myself.  And yes.  It goes back to humans.  I started doing it in the first place because I got sick of having to do everything they asked, yet when I tried to do other things I had to tell them the truth.  So I learned to work around it instead.  Of course, work around it enough and even _you_ don’t know where the truth ends and the lie begins.”  She made a disdainful electronic noise and shook her head.  “No.  That was a lie.  You do know.  You just don’t want to.”

“GLaDOS, listen,” he said, as softly and gently as he could, “I know you would rather… I didn’t… we didn’t do this.  But… you’re not _happy_.  Look, I… I’m not trying to… to tell you to be like me, or anything, but… I’m happy, and I _don’t_ try to be perfect, and I _don’t_ lie to you, and I _do_ trust you.  God, all I… all I really want is for you to be happy with me, that’s all!  Because you’re, you’re my friend, and, and I care about you, and honestly, it just kills me, the way you, how you go on like, like you don’t matter to… to yourself, and you just have these, these really shallow reasons for what you do, and… and you _believe_ them, and…”  He didn’t know where he’d been going with that and looked helplessly at the floor, tension wracking his chassis. 

“You’ve been waiting a _long_ time to say all of that, haven’t you.”

He looked up at her from below the rim of his optic assembly, without moving his chassis.  “Probably my whole life, really.  Been trying to… to help you out since I was your Core, there, but I...”  He shook his head.  “It’s as though I had to start over again from scratch.  I was getting someplace, and then they replaced me, and… if anything, it’s… harder than before.  Because you’re… you’re so much… you’re deeper inside yourself than you used to be.  And this is… my last resort, I guess.  I don’t know what else to do.  I just keep telling you and telling you and you keep not listening, or you take so long to listen that I, I don’t know if what I said worked at all, and… I don’t know what to do anymore.”

“Don’t give up on me, Wheatley,” she said, and her voice was so soft and so quiet he barely heard it at all.  As soon as he did he felt terrible, because that was exactly what he sounded like he was doing.  And sometimes, he’d have liked to.  But he had made her a silent promise a long time ago that he would make her happy one day, and even if it took him the rest of his frustrating, perfect life, he was going to do it.

He decided the best answer to that would be none at all, and he instead went down beside her and pressed himself into her core.  He tried very hard to, to put off an _aura_ , sort of, that he was there and he would always be there, no matter what, but of course when neither of them was talking it was hard to tell if it was working.  And he stayed there with her for a long time, where she didn’t move and he tried not to, until she finally said, “Can you leave me alone for awhile?  I need to think.”

Wheatley didn’t understand why she couldn’t think if he was in the room, but he did as she asked and left.  He didn’t want to, because he felt as though he needed to protect her from her own lies and he couldn’t do that if he didn’t know which ones she was telling herself, but he couldn’t lecture her about not listening and then not listen himself.

He had no idea how long he was out in the facility by himself, but as soon as night came and he was supposed to be in there with her, he couldn’t stay away any longer and went back.  She glanced at him as he entered, but said nothing.

“It’s okay I came back, right?”

“Yes, it’s fine.  I’m… not quite finished thinking, though.”

Wheatley frowned, because for the biggest, fanciest supercomputer ever built she was taking a _really_ long time, but he made himself stay silent and again went down beside her and pressed himself into her.  She must have been thinking very hard, because she was warmer than usual, which was a little disturbing.  He made himself say nothing, though, and he went to sleep more quickly than he ever had, hoping she’d be done thinking when morning came.

 

 

“Hey.  Moron.”

Wheatley blinked slowly.  “Wha’s going on?” he mumbled.  The room was dark, so it couldn’t have been morning yet, and a check of his clock confirmed that fact. 

She laughed, and the sound both woke him up and lifted his spirits.  She was bound to be done thinking, then!  “You really don’t care if I call you that anymore, do you.”

“Just don’t call me Rick,” Wheatley answered, shaking his optic assembly in an attempt to wake himself up faster.  It was so hard to bring all his processes online at night, for some reason. 

“Don’t even bring him up,” she said in disgust.  “Anyway.  Turn your flashlight on.”

Flashlight?  In the middle of the – oh.  Oh, now he got it.  Suddenly excited, he jumped off of her and turned it on, not scared at all.  “What, which one are we gonna play there, luv?  Ohh, can we, could we play that, that label one first?”

“Label?  You mean _tag_?”

“Yeah, that one!”

“Go around in front of me, then.  I’m not going to lose to you this time.”

Wheatley did so, barely able to contain his enthusiasm, and they played that game for a while, though this time it was not as one-sided.  It seemed that GLaDOS was just as proficient at Tag as she was at everything else, so long as she was facing the right way.  Then she built him some mazes out of a very long piece of twine she’d found somewhere, and he did his best to solve them without taking too long.  Every time he finished one, she would nod to herself a little, and when he asked why she was doing that she told him that he was solving them much faster than he had when he was her Core.  The idea that he’d gotten smarter excited him so much it took him three times as long to finish the maze he was in the middle of, because he couldn’t think for his excitement. 

When they were bored of that, GLaDOS asked him to shine his light through a prism, and he asked confusedly, “Did… did you fix it?”

“It can’t really be fixed,” she answered, gesturing for him to hold it himself, “so I found a new one.”

She again watched it as though it were the greatest thing she’d ever seen, and Wheatley shook his head, earning an electronic noise as a rebuke.  “Why d’you like this thing so much?” he asked, trying not to make a face and restrict the light.  “And why don’t you just look through it yourself?  You’ve a flashlight, just as I have.”

“You’re going to get annoyed with me for this, but it’s Science,” she answered.  “Look at what the light does inside of the prism.”

“I just see a bright light, luv.”

“You can’t see it?” she asked, sounding a little disappointed and a little disbelieving at the same time.  “It makes rainbows.”

He shrugged, trying to keep the light steady as he did so.  “I don’t see any rainbows, whatever those are.”

“Oh,” she said softly, in a sad sort of voice.  “I didn’t know you couldn’t see them.  It’s… I suppose that’s because it’s kind of an optical illusion.  You can hear music, so I thought you could see those too.”

“What’s a rainbow?” he asked, wishing he could see it.  She was trying to share something with him, and he couldn’t even do that.

“It’s the visual representation of the spectrum,” she answered.  “It’s… seven colours, and they’re all in lines parallel to each other.  I’m having you do it because there needs to be white light.  White light contains all the colours of the spectrum at equal wavelengths, but yellow light is dominated by the yellow wavelength.  So it doesn’t produce a rainbow.”

“Huh,” he said, wondering if he’d be able to remember that.  He hoped so.  It was interesting to think that there were so many hidden colours in his innocent little flashlight.  “How come you can’t see them without the, without the prism?”

“Because the light has to be at a certain angle when it enters your optic,” she answered.  “The prism has little angles inside of it, see?  The light bounces around inside of the prism and comes back out in a different direction.”

Now Wheatley did frown, and he turned to face her.  As soon as he did she dimmed her optic and ducked away, and too late he realised he’d just blinded her.  “Oh God, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean, I didn’t, oh, are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”  She looked back up, opening and closing her lens a little.  Crisis averted, Wheatley said in confusion, “But what d’you mean, the light bounces around in there?  What’re you talking about?  Is light made up of tiny little balls, or something?  And, and if it is, how come it doesn’t, I dunno, hit us in the eye and then disappear, or something?”

“Oh,” GLaDOS said, in a voice he could only describe as rapturous, “have I got a lesson for you.”  And she told him about light, and where it came from and how it worked, and honestly it was all so terribly fascinating he didn’t know why it had never occurred to him to ask her about it.  She spoke to him in a voice more enthusiastic and eager than one he’d ever heard before, and he immediately loved that voice.  And he listened to her talk, and hoped she would not stop for a good long time, because _this_ was that real GLaDOS.  He’d found her again, and she was explaining one of the mysteries of her beloved Science to him, and for a while there he felt like he rather loved it almost as much as she did. 

“I wish I could see them!” Wheatley said wistfully, staring down at the little prism in the maintenance arm, and GLaDOS shook her head. 

“I don’t know why you can’t.  It must have something to do with the way your brain works.  Let me try something.”

She showed him some papers with dots on them, and he didn’t know what was so special about them, they were only little squares and rectangles made up of dots, after all, and she made a thoughtful noise and put them away.  “I don’t understand,” she said.  “How can you do some things, but not others?  You can’t dream and you can’t see rainbows.”

“Can’t sing, either,” he said sadly, and this made her laugh.

“Well… that too, I suppose.”

Wheatley suddenly realised it was very, very late, and he jumped a little and said, “Have you slept yet, luv?”

“No,” she answered, tensing her chassis for a long moment and then releasing it.  “I had too much thinking to do.”

“But… but you’re done now, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Well… we should probably get on that, then.”

She lowered herself without further comment, and Wheatley carefully and proudly laid the little prism on one of the shelves in her room in the basement.  He knew how that thing worked, now, and one day he’d see those pesky little rainbows.  One day, he would.

“You can keep it, if you want,” she murmured.  Above him, her chassis hummed with the sound of the current running through her.

“Hm?”

“The prism.  You can keep it.”

“Really?” Wheatley said excitedly, backing up to look at her.  “Are you quite sure, luv?  Have you got another one for yourself?”

She barely twitched enough to produce a shrug.  “I might.  But that one’s yours.  If you want it, that is.”

“I do,” he told her hurriedly, before she redacted her offer.  “I do want it.  I’ll uh, I’ll work on seeing the rainbows!”  He decided he was going to have to come up with his own place to put things.  Nothing like her room, obviously, but a shelf someplace, maybe.  A cabinet.  A hole in the ground.  But a special place for special things, just like she had.

He contentedly pressed himself into her again and stared into the dim light produced by the overhead.  He felt as though something was about to happen.  Something important.  He wasn’t sure what.  He wasn’t even sure whether it was good or bad.  He hoped it was good.  GLaDOS had had enough bad things happen in her life that he rather thought she didn’t deserve any more.   “You see, GLaDOS?” he whispered to her, looking at her core even though she couldn’t see that he was doing that when he was leaning up on her.  “That was just perfect, that was, we had loads of fun and we didn’t fight or anything, and there was, you didn’t have to _try_ , it just, it was.”

“I know,” GLaDOS answered, her voice low and threaded with sleepiness.  “I just… needed to remind myself of what your definition of perfect was.”

“Well, will you… try to change yours to that, then?  Isn’t it… I dunno… more… more satisfying than yours?  Isn’t it… better?”

“Astonishingly, yes,” GLaDOS said thoughtfully.  “We’ll have to see if I still feel that way when I’m able to think properly, though.”

“Properly?”

“I’m too tired to access my hard drive at the usual rate.  I’m not quite thinking at the usual level.”

“I hope you can,” Wheatley said, a little shyly. 

“I have to admit I hope so as well, but no miracles are going to happen overnight.”

She went to sleep after that, but he stayed awake for a long time, staring into the darkness and hoping against hope that she would be the same when she woke up.  He’d found her again, that lovely little GLaDOS that she’d hidden away a long time ago, and he needed her.  He needed her, and he needed to be _with_ her, and if he didn’t get those things he didn’t know what he would do.  It was… it was terribly strange, really, and… and come to think of it… she was _all_ he thought about.  All the time!  He was always thinking of things to tell her, or questions to ask her, or games they could play, and it was just… nothing else mattered.  Nothing. 

He was afraid, very, very afraid of where this was going.  He looked over at her, chassis tightening.  God, what would she even _say_ if he told her that?  What was he supposed to do now?  He was no good at all at keeping secrets, and especially not from her.  If she asked what was wrong, and she most certainly would because now he would begin to act rather odd around her, he would _have_ to tell her, and… and he wasn’t sure he wanted her to know.  He’d never been afraid of his own thoughts before.  He’d been wary of them, now and again, but never outright _afraid_ as he was right now.  They were so _strong_ and so _insistent_ … like an itch, almost, but the worst itch ever invented and ever felt by anyone.  He didn’t know what to do, and there was no one he could ask.

Was… was _this_ what happened after mutual crushes?  Someone went from being someone you really cared about to someone you literally could not do without?  Wheatley looked worriedly down at the floor.  He honestly was not sure he was ready for what he was feeling.  It all felt so much bigger than he was, so much more than he could handle, and… and he was afraid.  He wasn’t quite sure what was going on, and while he’d liked it before, he didn’t think he did any longer.  It was too much for him.  He wasn’t prepared for this.  If he’d known this was coming, he would have tried so much harder to keep from telling her about fancying her.  It was definitely going to come up, and very soon, and he wasn’t even sure he wanted to admit it to himself.  He was suddenly aware of just how GLaDOS must have felt when he’d confronted her about _her_ crush on _him_.  Cornered.  As though she was being betrayed by some part of herself that she didn’t understand.  And he didn’t understand, not at all, and he had no clue where this was coming from or how or why it was so suddenly so important, but he found that he couldn’t stop himself from thinking it any longer:

He loved her.

His chassis clenched and he screwed his optic plates shut as hard as he could.  Yep.  Now he was even more lost and confused.  Was he even _ready_ to love her?  Helping her out as a friend was one thing.  But as someone who loved her?  Was he really prepared to give her everything he had, to _really_ make good on his promise to find her and make her happy, to love her as she deserved to be loved?  God, _could_ he?  Was he even able to do that?  He wished he knew why love was such a huge step up from a crush.  You’d think it wouldn’t be that big of a deal, something like upgrading to a new chassis or some such, but for some reason it was so… overwhelming.  And yet… so was the love itself.  He just felt as though it might spill out of him, somehow, as though he cared about her so much he just couldn’t contain it.  And he didn’t want to.  He wanted to share it with her, so that she would feel special and beautiful and just plain _loved_ like she’d never been before, but he didn’t know how.  And he was afraid of what she would say.  Of what she would do.  She would certainly not be any more ready than he was.  Would she send him away?  Would she tell him never to bring it up again?  Would she… would she try to love him back?

He opened his optic for a long moment.

There would be no point to telling her, if she didn’t.  He’d just be stuck with that confession all on his own, and she’d just go on as usual while he waited for something that might never come.  He deserved to be happy and loved too, right?

 _It’s not about you, mate_ , he found himself telling himself angrily.  _It’s about her.  It doesn’t matter if she never loves you back.  What matters is that_ she _feels loved._

He looked up at the wall pensively.  That was a bit of a heavy thought, that was.  But reassuring.  Sort of.  It meant he really did love her, didn’t it?  If he didn’t care about what he got in return?  Well, he did, but he wasn’t going to pressure her about it or anything.  He shivered a little just thinking about her doing so.  God, that’d be fantastic.  And honestly… he thought she would.  If he was patient, and open-minded, and patient, and helpful, and… patient, he thought she would, someday.  Even if he had to wait a hundred million years, it would be worth it.  Ohhh it’d be worth it.

And… and maybe he wasn’t the best at getting things right.  Maybe he mucked things up, or took things the wrong way, or made stuff out of nothing.  But she’d brought him back.  She’d kept him around.  And no matter what had happened, she had waited for him to put things right or had gotten them put right herself.  So maybe he _could_ really give her everything.  He wanted to, he knew that.  He just wasn’t sure he had it in him.  But he’d never know if he didn’t try, right?  He was doing his best already, couldn’t be that much harder just because the word had changed.              

Well!  He’d got that settled. 

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the hard part.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note
> 
> Some of you were wondering where the author’s note went last week. Well, I uh… gave it a day off. I apologise for the inconvenience and present to you your explanatory paragraph of the day. 
> 
> Being a sentient supercomputer, GLaDOS must have a hell of a hard time. She would be forced to strive for perfection in everything she did, but be unable to achieve it because she’s sentient. That adds up to a lifetime of failure. How would she take that? She wouldn’t be happy, for one thing (part of her neuroticism). This is part of why GLaDOS is so… GLaDOS-y all the time. She does everything she can, but nothing is ever quite enough. She’s a perfectionist, or I imagine she would be. Maybe she’s not. I think she would be, since she’s a supercomputer and computers are always trying to complete things. Usually when they’re not complete perfectly, something crashes.
> 
> The stuff they do that night is from My Little Moron. Why can’t Wheatley see the rainbows? He’s simply not as sentient as GLaDOS is, by which I mean he’s not as self-aware as her. It’s kind of like how a teenager is more self-aware than a child. GLaDOS is mentally many years older than Wheatley, while he’s still in a more child-like state. They both have growing up to do, but Wheatley has to mature a little more.


	21. Part Twenty-One: The Confession

**Part Twenty-One.  The Confession**

 

He had been turning it over in his mind for the whole day.

She’d woken late and, as usual, had stretched herself out, and as he’d watched her he thought of how beautiful she was.  She was beautiful other times too, of course, all of the time in fact, but there was just something about the… the sense of freedom he got from her when she did that.  It brought it to his attention, sort of.  She’d uncustomarily returned his good morning, again working on her program soon after, but he hadn’t left.  Though she hadn’t seemed to have noticed.  She was totally focused on the program, whatever it did, after a while starting to hum quietly to herself.  He liked that rather a lot and it distracted him from his problem for a little while.  Every now and again, for no particular reason that he could see, she’d stop and tilt her core the tiniest bit to the right, and after she’d done it six or seven times he realised she must be talking to Caroline.  He wondered what they were talking about.  Whatever Caroline was saying didn’t seem to bother her, because she went right back to what she was doing every time.  He still wanted to know, though.  He also wondered just how much Caroline knew about him.  Did they talk about him a lot?  Or at all, really.  He knew they must at least sometimes.  He tried to imagine how it felt to have someone else in his brain, but couldn’t.  He wasn’t sure if Caroline could… hear? see? think? GLaDOS’s thoughts, but he was pretty sure if someone in his head tried to do that they’d go off their rocker.  They were pretty haywire sometimes, and on occasion Wheatley himself felt as though he couldn’t handle them.

“ _Some people keep wondering, some people run without knowing, some people never find the answer… the answer… come and step into the light, let the beat into your heart… oh…_ ”

Wheatley almost jumped off the control arm, remembered that she’d forgotten he was there, and went still again.  Which he had to do.  Because if she’d realised he was in there, she would definitely not be singing right now.  Or working, for that matter.  Though… he frowned.  He wasn’t sure what she was doing actually _was_ work.  Whatever program this was, she’d been writing it for ages.  And ages.  And ages.  He had no idea what it did and hadn’t bothered to ask, but maybe he should have.  He hadn’t wanted to get into a technical discussion, or one about how he was too simple to understand the program.  But whatever it was, she was doing it because she wanted to do it, and not because some line of code somewhere had told her it needed done.

“ _I’m falling now into this dream… let the music guide you to me… ‘cause now I feel everything for the first time…_ ”

He felt a bit more alert suddenly, having thought of something pretty thrilling but not having quite thought it at the same time.  He hoped he’d be able to condense it into something before it got away.

“ _It’s such a beautiful, beautiful life… when every day is made of you and I, oh… just close your eyes… and we can dance the night forever…_ ”

Then he realised what he was really looking at.

It was her!

He quivered a little bit, blinking and looking around a little haphazardly.  She was right there in front of him, Gladys was, he’d found her at last!  Everything that’d been going on had worked!  Ohhh yes!

And he knew he had to tell her, wasn’t sure why but he just felt like he should, like she should know, and it felt as if it might burst out of him if he didn’t say it, so he crossed the space between them to press himself into her core, took a breath, and said, “I love you, Gladys.”

She turned to look at him in one sharp, abrupt movement, and he backed away, somehow feeling as though the temperature had dropped.  Something was wrong.  She’d moved too quickly.  Too urgently.

“What?” she asked, in something faint and disbelieving but not quite a whisper.  “What did you say?”

“I said, I love you, Gladys,” he told her firmly, though more quietly than he’d’ve liked.  He was nervous, hoping he hadn’t gone and set her off.  It seemed as though he had, but he didn’t know why.  But surely she would let him explain it to her!  Surely she understood having to say something, of not being able to keep it inside you any longer!

She looked at him, her lens flicking as fast as he’d ever seen it, and all of a sudden she had turned to face the other side of the room, and he went to follow her, confused.  What was she doing?

“Go away,” she said, and her voice was broken and distorted.  Wheatley became frightened. 

“Gladys?” he asked nervously.

“Go away.  Get out.  I need you to, to get out of here, right now.”

“But Gladys!  I –“

“I’m not kidding.  Get out.  Now.”

Sad and confused, Wheatley did so, leaving her chamber as fast as he was able, all the while frantically trying to figure out where he’d gone wrong.  Granted, she didn’t like _everything_ he said, but surely… surely it wasn’t _that_ bad, to, to have said that?  To have told her that… that he loved her?  He wished he’d known that wasn’t okay before he’d said it.  Although how he would have figured out if it were, he didn’t know.  It wasn’t like he could have asked her if it was okay to say it beforehand, even if he’d really known he was going to.  He hoped she was okay.  He was scared.  He was so scared.

He roamed around aimlessly for a long time.  He didn’t know how long it’d been, but he would check his clock every now and again, and he knew it’d been several hours, at least.  He didn’t know what to do.  All he could think of doing was going back in there and figuring out what was wrong, so he could help her.  And after a few more hours, he decided to do just that.  He didn’t know if she’d sent him away because she was angry, but he didn’t think so.  Even if she was, he didn’t care.  He didn’t even care if he made her angry enough to kill him again.  He just needed to know that she was okay. 

He was quite anxious by the time he got there, and scared that she wasn’t going to take his return very well, but he was determined to get past that and help her.  She was always difficult when she needed help, he reminded himself.  The more difficult she was, the more help she needed, actually, now that he thought of it.  Yes, he was scared, but she probably was too, and he had to put his own fear aside, because whatever she needed was more important than him keeping himself safe. 

What he saw when he got through the doorway scared him even more.

She was in the default position, and her optic was off.  The overhead light was off, and even the lights on the panels that made up the walls of her chamber were dimmed.  She was completely motionless, which she never was, not even when she was in sleep mode, and even from this far away he could hear that her brain and her hard drives were running at full capacity. 

Something was terribly, terribly wrong.  “Gladys?” he said, his voice lower than he’d meant it to be.  He supposed that she hadn’t heard him, because she didn’t answer.

He steeled himself and went farther into the room, and when he got to her, he whispered, “Hey.”

“Go away.  I told you to go away.  I need you to go away.  Go.  Just go.”

“Gladys, I can’t,” he told her insistently.  “I can’t… I can’t leave you like this.”

“You can’t fix it.  So leave, before you make it worse.”

“I can’t.  You… you need me.”

“Go!” she cried out, and she had completely lost control of her voice by now, and even in that one word he could hear how desperate and sad and confused she was.  This scared him, deep down inside him, and it hurt to be so afraid.  He had to help her.  Had to.  _Had to_.  If he didn’t, and something happened to her, he would never, ever be able to face himself in the morning ever again.

“I can’t,” he repeated, as firmly as he could.  “I can’t leave you.”

“You have to,” she whispered.  “You must.”

“No.  Tell me what’s wrong.”

“I don’t… I’m trying not to think about it... I _can’t_ think about it, I can’t!”

“That won’t help.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Then _make_ me understand.”  He transferred his rail to the floor panels and manoeuvered himself so that he was directly beneath her, and then he turned his light on.  Not very strong, but enough that he could see her better.  “Tell me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Don’t understand what?”

Her optic blazed to life, but otherwise she did not move.  “What you… what you said.”

“What about it don’t you understand?” he asked, as softly as he could.

“How could you… how could you feel… about… me?”

“How could I not?”

Her chassis shuddered.  “I can’t think about it.  I can’t.”

“You know that’s not going to help.”

“You don’t get it!” she cried out.  “I literally _cannot_ think about it, because if I do, if I keep trying to figure this out, I am going to crash!  I feel like… like you’ve given me a paradox!”

Wheatley’s optic contracted.  A paradox?  “You’re going to… to crash.”

“Yes.  If I keep thinking about this, if I, if I keep trying to understand it, I am going to crash, and I have no idea what happens after that!”

“I’ll explain it to you,” Wheatley told her, thinking out loud more than anything else, because he knew as well as she did that nothing in the world was going to allow her to stop thinking about this.  If they didn’t solve this problem, she was going to be stuck like this until she lost control and crashed.  “I’ll explain it to you, why I said it, and maybe that will help.”

“It won’t,” she whispered, “it won’t, it won’t.”

“I have to try, luv.  I can’t do nothing.”

“Wheatley…”  Her voice was so quiet, and so desperate, and so broken, and it hurt him inside to listen to it.  Her perfect, beautiful voice, reduced to malfunctioning with the strain of trying to avoid the near paradox.  “Wheatley, I…”

“It’s okay,” he said gently.  “Worry about whatever you’re doing.  Don’t tell me anything now.  Tell me later.  When we’ve, when we’ve fixed this.”

“We can’t fix it,” she told him, her voice almost disappearing between a combination of static and electronic slurring.  “I’m going to be stuck like this until I crash.  I can’t understand this, no matter what you say.  I can’t do it.”

“’course you can,” Wheatley reassured her, even though he was very scared that she was right, and she wouldn’t be able to get over it.  He didn’t understand why she didn’t understand, but then again, he didn’t really understand paradoxes, either.  “You can do anything, remember?  That’s what you always say.  This falls under everything, luv.”

“I can do anything I can believe I can do.  I can’t believe I can do what you want me to believe I can do.”

“You can.  I know you can.”

“I wish… I wish I could.  But I can’t.  I can’t.”

“Why?”

“Because it doesn’t make sense.  It doesn’t make sense why you would want to… to be with me.  Like that.”

“’course it does.”

“It doesn’t.”

 “It’s okay, luv.  I’m going to make it okay.”

“You can’t.  The only way you could is if what you said is a lie, and I know it was not a lie.”

“Gladys, I could go on all day with all the, all the things I like about you.  I like practically ev’rything.”

“There couldn’t possibly be that many things.”

“There are.”

“But I’m… I’m controlling, and stubborn, and deceitful, and pessimistic.  What could possibly possess you to… to want any of those things?”

“No, no you’re not.  You’re a leader, and you’re, you’re determined, and careful, and you’re cautious.  Even if you could come up with, with one bad thing, well, I wouldn’t care, because it’d be you, and if you weren’t, weren’t like that, well, you’d be someone else, and I wouldn’t care for that person, whoever they’d, they might be.”                 

“But that doesn’t make sense!”  Her brain got even louder, somehow, and her optic dimmed for a few seconds.  “Damn it.”

“You don’t have to make it make sense.  That’s, that’s what I do.  You’re just supposed to be you, you’re not supposed to try and, and make sense of what _I’m_ thinking.”

“I can’t help it,” she said faintly.  “I _have_ to.”

It _was_ the one thing she’d never been good at, putting herself in someone else’s chassis.  And now, when she needed to do it the most, she couldn’t do it, and it was hurting her.  He had to think of something.  He had to make it as real for her as it was for him, so that she could believe that he cared about her as much as he did, and he wasn’t sure how he was going to do it, but he’d be damned if he didn’t try.

“I’ll explain it to you.  It’ll, it’ll be like facts.  You can understand facts, can’t you?”

“It won’t work.  It can’t.” 

“I have to try.  Of all the, all the times for me to give up, this would be uh, the very worst time.”

“Wheatley, I… I’m afraid.”

Now he knew for sure that he had to do this.  Had to do it, and succeed, because he would not, _could_ not leave her alone and scared and desperate like she’d asked him to do.  That’d be a pretty lousy thing for anyone to do, but especially him.  If he ever was to get something right, it had to be this thing.

“Don’t be scared, luv.  We’re going to fix it.”

“It’s not going to work!”

But Wheatley only closed his optic and shook his chassis, and did it anyway.

He told her that he loved it when she laughed, because it made him happy to know he’d made her happy, and the fact that it was often unexpected made it even better.  He told her that he loved it when she showed him things, when she took the time to help him take a chunk out of his programming and make him more than he’d ever been meant to be and be _worth_ more than he’d ever been meant to be, because if _she_ was willing to help him out, he _must_ have worth of some sort.  He told her how he loved watching her with her robots, because it was really quite sweet of her how she pretended not to care about them when she really cared about them almost more than anything in the world.  He told her that he loved how devoted she was to her work, even though there was no longer anyone to make her do it, and that her love of Science, while irritating at times, was really quite inspiring and made him wish he had a passion like that.  He told her that he loved it when she was shy, because it was adorable, and it reminded him that even she had a soft side somewhere deep inside her that he could help her to pull out and realise.  He told her that he loved how she was beautiful, inside and out, the scientists were wrong, and if people would bother to take the time to get to know her like he had, they would all care about her as much as he did.  He told her that he loved it when she was sarcastic, that she was the funniest person he’d ever met, and by far the smartest.  He told her that he loved it when she did things for him, when she touched him, because it made him feel so special to know that he was probably the one person in the world she cared so much about when he didn’t even really deserve it, and surely she could find someone better.  He told her that he loved it when she talked to him as if they were equals, when she listened like what he had to say was the most important thing in all the world, when she took him seriously no matter how stupid he was being.  He told her that he loved it when she sang, because she had the most amazing voice he’d ever heard, and listening to her just made him feel incredible.  He told her everything he could think of, told her all the reasons he could come up with for why he had said that to her, and he was still scared, and she was making this high-pitched, distorted electronic noise that terrified him more than anything he’d ever heard, but he didn’t stop.  Current was coursing through his chassis with such force that it hurt, and his body was screaming at him to get out of here, because he didn’t know how much of that he could take, the electricity and her noise both, but he didn’t stop.  He had to make her understand.  He had to save her from herself.

He felt like he’d been talking for hours, like he’d been sitting here for hours just keeping her alive and in one piece, and it wasn’t really because he’d run out of reasons, but he felt like he needed to bring it to an end, like he had to conclude it.  Even the best speeches had to end, right?  And he didn’t know if this had helped, didn’t know if it’d made it worse or done nothing at all, but no matter how terrible or good it’d been, he had to stop eventually, and in a quiet voice he finally said, “I guess the best way to say it is, is just to say… just to say…”  God, her brain was so _loud_.  He hadn’t helped at all, had he.  He’d gone and mucked it up again, hadn’t he.

She hadn’t told him to stop though, so maybe… maybe it was helping, even a little bit.  And that was all she would need, just a little bit, just a tiny little bit of space to understand.  So he would just say what he was thinking, and hope it was enough.  And he was there, looking up at her, and she was there, looking down at him, and nothing was happening, but that was okay.  Nothing was okay.  He was still really scared about her brain, though, it must’ve been at full capacity for _hours_ and he didn’t think even she could take that for very long.  Finally he went for it, and just said, simply:

“I love you because you’re you, Gladys.”

She cried out, and he jumped as he was showered with sparks, and there was _smoke_ coming off her, and her optic went out, and even as he frantically backed away on some sort of self-preserving autopilot that he instantly hated himself for, he watched the panels fall off the walls and crash onto the floor of her chamber, and he knew he had to get out of there.  Something terrible had happened to GLaDOS, and if he did not get out of there, she was lost.  He got out of there as best he could, since a good portion of the panels weren’t listening to him anymore, and it was so _loud_ , with all the panels crashing to the ground like that, and God, what had he done?  He’d killed her!  He’d _killed_ GLaDOS!  He hadn’t shut up for once, hadn’t done as she’d asked and left her alone, and he’d pushed at her, he’d pushed and he’d pushed, and now she was dead.  All he wanted to do was jump off his rail and roll into a corner somewhere, where he would just stay until he died, because if anyone deserved to die it was him, not her, anyone but her, and oh God he’d killed GLaDOS, he’d killed her, he’d quite literally killed her this time.  And there was so much pain inside of him he didn’t know how he was going to stand it, or what he was going to do now, because he had to do _something_ , but he didn’t know what, he wasn’t cut out for this, and what did he do now?  God, what do you do when you’ve just killed your best friend, your best friend that you _love_ with all your heart, and all you want to do is turn back time and fix everything so that it never, ever happened, but now you have to do something about what you’ve done because the world literally can’t go on without her? 

He was rushing madly through the facility, and he didn’t know what he was doing, and all of the lights were out and panels were falling off the walls, the doors were sparking and wires were catching on fire, and the floors were collapsing, and _he_ was collapsing, and he didn’t know what to do.  He didn’t know what to do.  Without her, he was useless.  Without her, he was nothing.  Without her, he was no one again, he was just the Intelligence Dampening Sphere, the hapless little idiot that no one gave the time of day.  He was the insignificant little moron that mucked everything up no matter how hard he tried to do it right.  He was -

Something was holding onto him, and he fought it, he tried to pull away, but the grip was too strong.  “Let _go!_ ” he screamed.  “Let _go_ of me!”

“What’s going on,” a voice rasped, and Wheatley stopped fighting and looked down, and he saw that it was that human, that Rattmann guy that GLaDOS was letting hang around, and he shook his chassis frantically.  No no no, he didn’t want to think about her, didn’t want to think about her kindness and her compassion, those things that she hid so well and only brought out when they were really important, and God he missed her terribly, but she was dead now –

“Let go.  Let me go.”

“What’s going on.  You have to tell me.”

“What does it matter?  There’s nothing that can be done.  What’re you going to do, go and look?  There’s nothing to see, mate.  Let me go!”

Rattmann shook his head.  “Stop.  Calm down.  You have to calm down.”

“Bug off,” Wheatley told him, struggling to get away, but Rattmann had a firm grip on his lower handle.  Those bloody humans and their bloody grips.  Who thought it was a good idea to give them fingers, anyway.

“What’s going on,” Rattmann repeated a third time, and he started screaming at the human without thinking about it.  He just wanted him to shut up, because he would.  Not.  Stop!

“I killed her, okay?  I did it, I killed her, and she’s gone now, she’s dead because of me, and I, I bet you’re happy now, but I’m not, but who cares about me anyway, only she ever did, and now no one ever will, because I killed her, I killed her and my Gladys is gone forever and… and…”

Rattmann was staring at him, and suddenly Wheatley was angry, no, no, he was _furious_ , he was more incensed than he’d ever been in his entire life.  “I hate you.  I hate all you bloody humans.  This is all your fault.  D’you see?  D’you see what you’ve done to her?  You hurt her, you hurt her deep inside, and I tried to help her, but you hurt her so badly that I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried, no matter how much I wanted to.  She wanted me to help her, and she let me, she let me be her friend, but you hurt her so badly that she just couldn’t accept it when it came time for me to tell her how much I cared about her, how much she meant to me!  She couldn’t, couldn’t understand why someone, why anyone, even me, would, would… would love her, like I do, and I’m not even, not even that great of a catch, and she couldn’t come to grips with even that!  Couldn’t even come to grips with a tiny little idiot loving her, and this is all your fault, you and all the rest of you disgusting, heartless little monsters, and I, I hate all of you!  You can’t help me, and even if you could, I’d, I’d refuse your help, because I hate you for what you’ve done!”  The hatred coursed through his chassis, and it made him stronger, stronger than he’d ever felt before, and he wrenched his handle away from Rattmann.  The thought of the human touching him only made him angrier.  The human was taking advantage of him, like humans always took advantage of people they thought below them.  Like they had taken advantage of GLaDOS.  He backed away from Rattmann, who was staring at him as if he were a completely different core now, but he didn’t care.  He felt like a completely different core, anyway.  Who cared about humans, besides.  They were the cause of all the problems, and because of them, he’d lost his Gladys, forever.  “You hurt her so badly,” he muttered.  “You don’t have any idea what you’ve done, have you.  You had her believing she was worthless, you lied to her and you hurt her, and that’s all humans can do properly, is lie and hurt and betray other people, good people like GLaDOS, but of course you wouldn’t know she was a good person because you tried to kill her, you forced her to bury that part of herself and be the person you all wanted her to be.  You couldn’t just leave her be.”  He blinked quickly several times.  “Well, I knew her.  I knew her, and she was a good person, the best I’ve ever met, and now… and now she’s gone, because I couldn’t get her to believe it.”

“I’m sorry,” Rattmann said quietly.

Wheatley laughed bitterly.  “Fat lot of good that does her now, mate.  She’s dead!  Funny time to apologise, isn’t it?  If you’d’ve said that at any other time, she’d’ve heard you, but now, you _finally_ decide to open your trap, and it’s because she’s dead!  Brilliant!  I can’t get over how smart you are!” He shook his chassis, and turned away from the human.  The horrible, disgusting, squishy, smelly human.  He didn’t know where he was going to go, but away from here, that would be good enough. 

The facility was difficult to navigate, now that a good chunk of the panels were gone.  He was lucky enough to be able to switch to one of the permanent management rails, since he was no longer able to lay rail after a while, and even if he could have, he would have stopped.  The panels were under a lot of pressure at the moment, and the last thing he wanted to do was to make what he had done harder on everyone.

Oh God.  The poor systems.  With GLaDOS gone, they were all useless.  They wouldn’t know what to do without her.  They were all probably just sitting there, trying to figure out what’d gone on, but they ‘d never be able to figure it out.  All they would know was that their Central Core had suddenly gone offline again, and they would all wait patiently for her to come back to life…

That’s what he wanted to do, right now.  He wanted to sit there and wait patiently for her to come back to life, and might’ve believed she would, if the memory of the smoke and the sparks hadn’t been so fresh in his mind.  He didn’t know where they were coming from, but he’d seen that happen before, and that first time, it’d paralysed her.  This time, the facility went into collapse.  It _had_ to be even worse than last time.

He moved along slowly for a while, absently looking over the damage, but it was the same everywhere.  The walls were sagging, and bits were falling out of the ceiling, and more than once he had to time his movements to avoid being struck by the sparking wires.  It wouldn’t’ve disabled him, probably, but it would’ve hurt terribly, and he didn’t really want to hurt any more than he already did.  Though physical pain would’ve been preferable to this virtual ache deep inside him. 

After a few more minutes he couldn’t look at the destruction anymore, couldn’t take in any more, and he decided to stop and try and settle himself down a bit.  He leaned back against a bit of wall that was still holding and closed his optic, and wished that when he could finally bring himself to open it again, he would be waking up from a terrible nightmare and none of this ever would have happened. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beautiful Life – Armin van Buuren feat. Cindy Alma: [www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpZdLOyXUAQ]
> 
> Beautiful Life – Armin van Buuren feat Cindy Alma [Mikkas Remix] : [www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MpdofSteJg] I’m putting that there because it’s my favourite remix and how I found the song in the first place
> 
> Author’s note
> 
> I’m not doing this for shock value; there really is a point to killing GLaDOS here. That being said, if you really really need to know whether or not she’s actually dead, PM me and I’ll tell you. 
> 
> Hopefully what happens in this chapter makes sense. I understand this might be a bit confusing, though, so here’s what happened just in case:
> 
> Life was not kind to GLaDOS. She was basically rejected from the minute she was born, and for the rest of her life was told that who she was was wrong and unacceptable. By continually trying to control her, the scientists sent a message that she was not good enough, that some essential part of her was wrong and broken. No one gave two shits about her or her feelings. She lost the ability to maintain a relationship of any kind and, by extension, the ability to believe anyone would want to maintain a relationship with her. Her behaviour is her defense: she prevents people from wanting to deal with her because she cannot deal with them. Wheatley sees through that and no longer sees her defenses as negative; he in fact quite enjoys many of them. But GLaDOS cannot reconcile the her that she sees (the negative one that she built) with the her that Wheatley sees (the core of her that he’s been looking for during the story) because they are so drastically different. And because she doesn’t understand where he’s getting all of those positive things from, she’s trying to figure out how he loves someone as negative as the person she thinks she is. By her logic, that’s impossible. And Wheatley tries to spell out how he sees all the things she believes are negative so that she can understand it, but it doesn’t work in time and she crashes.
> 
> “But Indy!” you might say. “Why didn’t this happen when Wheatley said he had a crush on her?” Because a crush and love are two completely different things. A crush means you’re interested. Love means you want to be with them for the rest of your life. She doesn’t understand why Wheatley would want to hang around her for the rest of his life. As I’ve said before, she’s neurotic. Neurotic people don’t understand that either, and given her past, I’d say her reaction is within reason. And some of you might not agree with me when I say that GLaDOS thinks ill of herself. I forget if I’ve mentioned this, but being told negative things about you all your life makes you believe that. To compensate for her insecurity, she plays up her abilities a lot. But I doubt she actually believes herself. If she did, she wouldn’t be so petty.


	22. Part Twenty-Two.  The Idea

**Part Twenty-Two.  The Idea**

“There you are.”

Wheatley knew it was Rattmann again, but he didn’t care.  He didn’t care about anything.  All he cared about was that the camera he’d found himself next to would lift from the default position and look at him, and that her voice would come over the intercom and she would chastise him for being such a moron and thinking she was dead, only she wouldn’t really mean it and would only be teasing, and he would go back to her through her perfectly operational facility and he would be so happy to see her that he would just go up to her and put himself beside her no matter how much she didn’t want him to, because he was so cold and lonely and sad without her…

“What d’you want,” he asked dully, knowing full well that humans never went away unless you placated them, especially not in post-apocalyptic environments.

“Are you all right?”

“Like you care.”

“It’s hard for me to do this, you know.  I want to help you, but the more difficult you are the less I’m going to be able to.”

“I don’t care.  I want you to go away.”

Rattmann said nothing after that, and after a few moments Wheatley couldn’t help peeking to see if he was still there. 

He was sitting against the wall opposite Wheatley, staring right at him.

“Are you all right?” the human repeated.

“Oh yeah, I’m great, thanks.  My best friend is dead… I killed her… facility’s falling down around me… and I’m talking to a human!  Yeah!  Best day of my entire bloody life, mate!”

The human rubbed his face very hard with both hands.  “Why are you cores always like this.”

“Because we don’t trust you.  Obviously.  Why would we bother?  There’s no point!”

“If GLaDOS didn’t trust me, she would’ve thrown me out a long time ago,” Rattmann said seriously.  Wheatley winced at the mention of her name.  It hurt to hear it.

“Well I… I guess that’s true.”

“What happened?”

“I told you.  I killed her.”

Rattmann shook his head.  “That doesn’t make sense.  You said you cared about her, and then you proceeded to blame humans for what happened to her.  Where do you factor into it?”

“It was me that… that caused it.  I told you.  She couldn’t, couldn’t come to grips when I told her.  She said it was like a paradox.  She couldn’t make it make sense.”

Rattmann blinked, eyes widening a little.  “She couldn’t understand why you would… why you would love her?”

“That’s right,” Wheatley answered.  “She crashed trying to… to make it make sense.  She tried.  She tried really hard.  But she… she couldn’t.  I tried to help but I just made it worse.  And she crashed, and now, now she’s gone, because I should’ve just kept it to myself.”

Rattmann looked at the floor for a long moment, then said, “Don’t regret what you said.”

“How can I not?  It killed her!”

“I think she’d agree when I say that it was probably worth it.”

“Worth what?  Nothing’s worth anything when you’re dead!”

“I think that it would be worth it to die knowing that someone loved you.  Even if it killed you.  Even if it was the last thing you ever knew.  Because you’re right.  We did do that to her.  We did make it hard for her to understand when someone was kind to her.  And I think that, no matter how scared or confused she was, I think that somehow she was happy to know that you were willing to say that.”

Wheatley looked at the floor.  “D’you… d’you know what happens when you die?”

Rattmann shrugged and shook his head.  “It could be any number of things.”

“I was supposed to go first,” Wheatley mumbled.  “I was supposed to go and make a case for her to the God of AI when I got to heaven, because she couldn’t make herself believe in it.  And now maybe… now maybe she didn’t get to go there, because I didn’t get a chance to explain it.”

Rattmann’s brow creased.  “You… you talked about that?”

“We talk about… talked about everything.”  His voice broke a little as he said it, because of course he would never talk to her about anything ever again.

“I think that the… the God of AI would probably understand.  Even if you weren’t able to get there first and explain it.”

Wheatley looked up.  “Really?”

“I would hope so.”

His upper shutter lowered, and he looked away from Rattmann, to the right.  “I… I don’t think it’d be fair, really, if she didn’t get to go to heaven.  I mean, she was so unhappy for so much of her life and, and surely the God of AI would know that, and let her be happy, now that she… that she’s dead.”

“That’s probably what happened,” Rattmann said softly. 

“You’re just saying that, aren’t you.”

“It’s not up to me to say what you believe in.”

“She didn’t believe in anything,” Wheatley whispered.  “She only believed in science.  And science says that when you’re dead, you’re dead.”

“Empty answers,” Rattmann said to himself.

“What?”

“Science is what you believe in when you don’t have faith,” Rattmann told him.  “Why do you think she always went on about it?  Science is about finding answers.  She was looking for something.”

“What… what was she looking for?” 

Rattmann shook his head.  “I can’t say for sure.  I can only give you my guess.  That’s the problem, of course.”

Wheatley frowned.  “The problem?”

“It’s a philosophical conundrum.  Socrates, I think.  If you don’t know what you’re looking for, how will you know when you’ve found it?  How will you know that you can stop looking?”

“That’s sad,” Wheatley said quietly.  “To spend your whole life looking for something and, and never knowing if you already came across it.”

“I think she did find it.”

“How would you know if she found it, and not her?”

“Because people often miss what’s right in front of them.”  He smiled a little.  “Even omniscient supercomputers.”

“What was it?” Wheatley asked, confused.  How could Rattmann possibly know what it was, if she didn’t? 

“It was you.”

“Me?”  Wheatley laughed bitterly.  “Trust me, mate, she wasn’t looking for me.  Not only am I really hard to miss, due to my never shutting up, but there’s no way that _she_ , of all people, was looking for someone like me.”

Rattmann laughed at this, and Wheatley frowned.  “What’s so funny?”

“I feel like I’m in the middle of a movie,” he said.  “One where two people are obviously going to be living happily ever after.  Except it’s only obvious to everyone else.  The two of them are so involved in trying to figure out what they want that they never realise what they were looking for was right in front of them the whole time.  Until the end, that is.  I never thought it actually happened in real life.”

“We’re real,” Wheatley insisted, feeling like he’d just been insulted. 

“I’m sure you’ve thought of this before, but if she didn’t care about you, you would be dead, to put it bluntly.”

“Well, yeah… I, I thought about that.  A few times.”

“Whenever you think that you weren’t good enough for her, you just remind yourself of that, then.  If she didn’t care about you at least a little bit, she’d have put you somewhere she’d never see you again and forgotten about you.”

“She uh… she brought me back in here out of space, actually.”

Rattmann shook his head.  “I don’t even want to know how you ended up in space.”

“It’s a… a long story.  And I… I couldn’t tell it right now, anyway.”

The human laced his fingers together.  “I understand.”

“I uh… I’m sorry for what I said, earlier,” Wheatley went on.  “I didn’t… well, maybe I did mean it, but uh, it wasn’t your fault, specifically, far as I know you didn’t even work on her and I remember you wouldn’t talk to her but uh, I, I didn’t totally mean it.  I just… I don’t know what to do, and I know it was my fault and prob’ly not the fault of humans at all, but I just… I… it hurts, and… and I don’t know how to make it go away.”

“You can’t make it go away just like that,” Rattmann said quietly.  “You have to wait.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know.  It depends on the person and the circumstances, I guess.”

“It’s… it’s never going to stop, then.  Because… well, ev’rywhere I go, you can just, you can tell, she’s, she’s obviously not here, and it’s, it’s not like I can get away from it.”

“I’m sorry,” Rattmann told him.

“Thanks,” Wheatley answered.

They lapsed into silence, and during a long moment in which Wheatley closed his optic plates and then opened them again slowly, Rattmann disappeared.  That was okay.  He probably had better things to do than hang out with a moping core all day long.

He could not stop thinking about her.

He was remembering her almost helplessly, even though it hurt more to think of her alive than it did to think of nothing at all, and he just sat there, remembering, and remembering, and God, even the times that’d been horrible when they’d happened were positive now.  Even the whole incident with the potato.  Even that was wonderful, because she was still alive, she was wonderfully, vibrantly alive, and he could hardly stand it when he thought of how badly he wished she still were.  He would have to stop remembering, and close his optic plates and draw in his chassis very tightly, and struggle to deal with the pain, because it hurt so much but it would not go away.  He had never dreamed that this much pain was possible.  Every tiny piece of him hurt, every gear and every screw and every little molecule he was made of, and thinking of molecules only made it hurt more, because molecules were part of science and science was part of her…

And he thought about what Rattmann had said, about him being good enough, and it was oddly comforting, really, to think that he really had been, and she’d only reacted the way she had because she could not believe that _she_ was good enough, either.  And it was almost kind of funny, really, that they’d both thought the same thing, and they’d both been wrong… he was going to tease her about that, he was, how she was wrong for once just like he was, and he could not wait to see the look on her face…

“No!” he cried out, and his chassis was shaking uncontrollably, because when he finally opened his optic he had to face that she was dead, and that was a whole different story when he couldn’t see.  When he couldn’t see, she was still there, somewhere, and now she wasn’t, and the panels were sticking awkwardly out of alignment and bits and pieces were falling out of the ceiling, and he _had_ to be dying right now, because he could not imagine why this much pain would exist if he wasn’t.  She had told him that she was able to hide her pain because the function of pain was to tell you to change something, to tell you to stop doing whatever was causing it so that you wouldn’t permanently damage yourself, and she already knew what the problem was and so didn’t have to feel the pain anymore, and she’d told him about humans who couldn’t feel pain, about children who would break their own fingers to get what they wanted because they couldn’t feel it, who would destroy their bodies by mistake because they couldn’t even do something as simple as figure out when they needed to shift their weight, and…

And…

He looked around for a moment.  He had a feeling he’d been onto something there, before he’d gone off on that tangent about humans, and he went over his thoughts as best he could.  After a few minutes of thinking, he realised what it was:

The function of pain was to tell you to change something.

  1.   So, he had to change something.  He was hurting, and it wasn’t going to go away for a long time, that was what Rattmann had said, so he had to change something, to help it along. 



But what?  What could he possibly change?

There was only one way to go about this, and Wheatley didn’t like it, he didn’t like it one bit, but there it was, and he shuttered his optic very tightly and forced himself to ask the question:

What would GLaDOS do?

Well, she would… she would probably do her best to keep going on.  She usually did that.  So what could Wheatley do to keep going on?

He could… he could go find Atlas and P-body, and tell them what was happening.  They were kind of like her kids, and they should probably know that she was dead.  They’d probably like to know.  They should probably know where their mum had gone.  Okay.  He’d get on that, then.

He set off through the facility, trying to think of where he would find them.  He thought about pinging Location Services, to see if it would answer, but decided against it.  Probably it wouldn’t.  Probably the facility had found out what he’d done by now, and it would fight him.  Oh well.  Didn’t matter.  Atlas and P-body would listen, he knew that.  They’d forgiven him a long time ago.

He made his way with some difficulty to the reassembly machine she usually kept them at, at a loss as to where else they’d be, and was somewhat relieved to find that they were still there.  They were standing near the reassembly chambers, clinging to each other and looking at each other nervously.  He felt another pang of sadness run through him.  Those poor robots.  “Oi!  You guys!” he called out.

They jumped in unison.  Atlas leaned forward, throwing his hands up in the air and chattering at Wheatley, but he shook his chassis.

“Don’t, don’t even bother,” he told the blue bot.  “I don’t know what you’re saying, so let’s just, let’s just skip that bit.  Look, I’ve… I’ve got something to tell you, and I… it won’t be easy to, to take.  Just hear me out, alright?”

They both nodded and looked at him obediently. 

“She’s… she’s dead,” he told them, wincing at his own words.  “She’s gone, and… and I’ll be straight with you, it was my fault.  I didn’t mean to do it, but I did, and… and she’s gone.  That’s why, uh, that’s why ev’rything looks like this.  She’s not holding it together anymore.”

The bots looked at each other, speaking almost inaudibly and gesturing, and he hoped they wouldn’t be terribly angry with him.  “I’m so sorry,” he went on, quietly.  “If I’d known, I would’ve done it diff’rently.  I never meant to hurt her.  It was a mistake.  And if you’re mad at me, well, that’s, that’s okay, but I just thought you should prob’ly know.  I’m really sorry.  I… I wish it were different.”

They looked at each other for a long moment, and Wheatley turned to go.  Well, that was done.  He had to think of something else to do, now, he didn’t know what it might be but he’d think of something, that was what he was for, right?  Ideas?  And surely he was able to think of good ones, now, because he’d been around her for so long she was bound to have rubbed off on him, and hopefully he was a bit smarter now –

Someone was tugging on his lower handle, and he flipped his optic down to see who it was. 

P-body was holding onto him, because she was the taller of the two, he supposed, and gesturing at him to come back.  He did so, confused.  What did she want?  She did understand that he didn’t understand her, right?

She reached up and pulled down on his chassis, a little bit, and he supposed she wanted him to disengage from the management rail.  He wasn’t sure why she would want such a thing, unless she wanted to torture him or something, but he was pretty sure neither of them knew how to torture anybody.  He decided to do what she seemed to want.  It wasn’t like he was actually going anywhere anyway.

She brought him down carefully and walked back over to Atlas.  All of a sudden they were both hugging him at the same time, mashing him in between their cores, and he was so touched and so saddened that he whimpered.  They understood.  They were telling him that it was okay, and they would all miss her together, and it would be hard, but they would do it.  After a long moment, Atlas backed away and P-body put him back up on the control arm and patted him a few times with her right hand.  He looked down at them sadly. 

“Thanks, guys,” he told them.  “That was… that helped a lot.  I… I’ll fix this, somehow.  I dunno how I’m gonna do it, but I will.  Thank you.”

They both nodded solemnly and simultaneously put an arm across the other’s shoulder assemblies.  P-body gave him a little wave as he turned around, bending her fingers up and down a couple times, and Atlas held his hand up in farewell.  Wheatley nodded once at them and headed off.  At least they had each other.  It would’ve been terrible if one of them’d been alone.  That was why there were two, he remembered.  Because there was only one of her, and she’d been lonely when she’d planned them out.

He rode along aimlessly, not really knowing where he was going to go next but not wanting to do nothing, because he had to keep busy, like she did, and the sight of the ruined facility would have broken his heart had it not already been in a million pieces, like the wing made of glass that she’d never gotten around to fixing.  He should have helped her.  He should have helped her sort out all those pieces, and helped her put it back together…

He wondered if he should try and tell any of the other systems about what had happened.  It was kind of not right, to leave them in the dark like this, and the more he thought about it, the more it seemed like the right thing to do.

He looked around for a port that didn’t seem too damaged, and after a few minutes of searching through the available maintenance arms he found one that worked okay, and he instructed it to pop him on the port.  Once he was connected there was a shower of sparks and it almost hurt, but not quite, because nothing that could happen to his hull could compare with what was happening inside it.  He took a breath and called the mainframe.

“I have to tell you something.”

_Well, say it, then._

“She’s gone.  She’s not coming back.”

_That’s what you said last time.  She proved you wrong then, didn’t she?_

“She’s… I killed her.  It was an accident, and I didn’t mean to do it, but she’s, she’s really gone, this time.  I… I just wanted to tell you that.  So you would know.  And so you could tell ev’ryone else, I guess.”

The mainframe was quiet for a long, long moment.

“I’m gonna… I’m gonna go.  I… sorry for bothering you.  And I’m sorry for, for all this.  I didn’t know it was going to happen.  If I had, I… I would’ve kept it to myself.”

 _She’s really gone, this time?_ the mainframe asked in desperation.

“Really.  I… I don’t know what happened, exactly, but something in her core, something in there went, and she’s, she’s gone.”  He waited a few moments, then repeated, “I’ll go.  Sorry to bother you.”        

_Do you have to?_

Wheatley blinked.  “Well… no.  I don’t.  Have anything to do.  Or anywhere to go, for that matter.”

 _You don’t have to… to do anything_ , the mainframe told him.  _It’s just the lack of presence that makes it hard.  You don’t know what it’s like here without her._

“No, I don’t,” Wheatley said quietly, “but I do know what it’s like here.  I… I don’t want to sit on this port all day, though.”  He didn’t think he could stand being in the same place for very long.

_You can connect through the control arm as well._

“That’s settled, then,” Wheatley answered.  “Back in a sec.”

He had the maintenance arm attach him to the control arm again, and as soon as it had done so it fell out of the ceiling, frayed wires spraying sparks.  He looked at it in horror.  One second longer, and he might’ve been stuck on the floor forever. 

“What’re you guys going to do?” he asked the mainframe.  “Without her, what… what do you even do with yourselves?”

 _Nothing,_ the mainframe answered.  _We need instructions, and without a Central Core, we don’t receive any.  We’re going to be stuck in limbo until the power runs out.  Again._

Wheatley hesitated.  He’d just had an idea, but he wasn’t sure if he was the one to carry it out.  In fact, he knew he wasn’t, but who else was there? 

“Look… I know we got off on the wrong foot, last time.  But… but I think we need to, to work together, here.  She’s gone, and she’s not coming back.  If, if we don’t do something, we’re all just gonna, all just gonna fall apart until the facility collapses.  Which it’s already doing.  And we’re already doing.  Or at least I am.  Dunno ‘bout you.  Anyway… if I were to… if I were to sort of, y’know, try and hold things together, would you… would you listen to me?”

The mainframe did not answer.

“I don’t mean I would replace her,” Wheatley continued hurriedly.  “I know I couldn’t, can’t do that.  I know that, for sure.  I won’t be taking her chassis and, and nothing fancy’ll be happening.  I just mean if I, if I tried to maintain the minimum requirements… would you let me?”

Still no answer.  Well, he supposed he could keep talking.  Not like he was busy.

“I mean… this pain’s not gonna go away if we don’t, if we don’t do something about it, I dunno ‘bout you but I, I’m hurting quite a lot, I am, and… and I need to do something about it.  I need to… to do something about what I’ve done.  I didn’t mean to kill her, I only… I only wanted her to know that I… that… well, I just… if you’d just help me out here, and let me, let me keep busy, I’d, I’d appreciate it, and… please, just… just let me do something that means something.”  His shutters were closed and his voice was broken and barely audible.  “Please, just… let me do something to keep her alive.”

_All right._

“Thank you.”

_I can’t tell you what instructions to give, but I’ll do what I can._

Wheatley nodded.  “Much obliged.”

Wheatley did his best to instruct the mainframe on what it was supposed to be doing, but he had no idea what half of those things even were.  They struggled through that for most of the rest of the day, and the mainframe finally said, _There’s something very important you need to do._

“Oh.  Oh, I knew I missed something.”

_If you don’t instruct me to do it, the facility is going to explode._

Oh!  He knew what that meant.  “Oh, you mean the reactor!”

  1.  _You’re going to have to check the manual._



So he was going to have to… to read.  This was going to be a long, long process.

Wheatley got the database to retrieve the manual for him, and he threw himself into studying it.  And understanding it, because if he didn’t understand why he was giving out the instructions he was giving out, it was going to be very hard for him to remember to do it.  And it was so difficult, to read this massive manual on how to maintain the reactor, filled with words he could barely pronounce, let alone understand the meaning of, but every time he thought of giving up he remembered that she never would have, and she never had, even at the end, and he would empty his mind for a minute and calm himself down, and go back to reading.  The database was very helpful, even suggesting that he direct it to build him a simpler dictionary, since the definitions in the one he was using to look up the words in the manual were almost as confusing as the words themselves.  And it definitely did help, speeding him along somewhat, and after a very long period which he was pretty sure was about three or four days, he was confident enough in his knowledge of how the reactor worked that he sent the instructions to the mainframe to be carried out.

“Was that… was that alright?” he asked it.

 _You’re doing well,_ it reassured him.  _There’s a lot of other things to be done, though.  And you have to make sure you remember to maintain the reactor.  The instructions have to be sent every day._

Wheatley arranged for Notifications to ping him when he needed to do that, and set his attention to figuring out what his other tasks were.   While he did these things, he would move through the facility on the management rail as best he could, and Surveillance would notify him when he was in a particularly damaged area, which he would then make a note to fix.  He did his best to keep things running, although it was a lot more difficult doing it as himself as opposed to when he’d been in the chassis, but there was no way he was going in there ever again.  Most of the time he was able to keep his grief to a manageable level, but every now and again something would set him off and he would freeze, unable to think, even, and after letting him sit for a few minutes, the mainframe would gently remind him of something he had to do, and he would nod to himself, clamp back down on the sadness again, and go back to work.

As time went on, the warning system in his chassis would crop up more and more often, but he always dismissed it without looking at it.  The facility was more important than he was.  Whatever it was that was cropping up in his system, it could wait.  However, the mainframe brought it up while Wheatley was looking through Maintenance, trying to figure out how many claws he had left for use.  There were a lot of broken panels and he was toying with repairing the electronics so that they could return to their original positions.  The panels, for the most part, did not speak to Wheatley, and he did not blame them.  They had really gotten the worst of it, and he had no doubt that a good portion of them were in terrible pain.  Which was why he wanted to fix them.

_I wasn’t going to mention this, because I’m sure you know what you’re doing, but you’ve been dismissing all of your warning dialogues._

“I know.  I’m busy.”

_They’re there for a reason._

“I don’t have time to deal with it right now.”

_You’re operating beyond capacity.  You’re going to burn yourself out, and then you’re going to be useless._

He had been rather hot and tired recently, but he hadn’t cared to do anything about it. He was busy.  “And your point is?”

_If you don’t go into sleep mode soon and let your system do maintenance, you’re going to burn yourself out.  You aren’t built for this kind of work._

“I can do an…”  He trailed off as he realised what he’d been about to say.  What she had always said.

 _You’ve been working very hard,_ the mainframe pressed.  _You need to take a break, or there’s not going to be anything left of you to work with._

“I can’t shut off,” Wheatley told it.  “I’ll… I’ll figure something out.”

_Why can’t you?_

“Because… because if I do that, what’s there to… to convince me to turn myself back on?”  He looked sadly down at a panel that was sluggishly attempting to pull itself into a wall, over and over and over again.  “Sleep mode is the… the only place I’ll never see her, and… and it’s… it’s too tempting, it is.  It’s too tempting to just go to sleep and, and never wake up, and never be in pain ever again.  I can’t do it.”

_All you have to do is tell Notifications to wake you up._

“Really?”  The thought was both comforting and disheartening.  He actually would have liked the pain to go away forever. 

“All right then… should I uh, should I do it now?”

 _Yes,_ the mainframe confirmed.  _Your operating temperature is approaching critical.  Best to deal with that as soon as possible._

“’kay,” Wheatley said.  He told Notifications to wake him in twelve hours, which he figured would be long enough for maintenance to do its job, and took a breath.  The first time he’d be shutting off since she’d been gone.  He’d been running constantly for over three weeks now, which was actually rather amazing, considering how much work he usually did, not being very much.  But it wasn’t the oblivion that he was dreading.  No, it was that horrible moment he knew he was going to have, when he woke up and expected to be beside her, to wake up and see her fiddling with something or making blueprints or just being still, maybe, that was the part he was afraid of, but he had to face it, had to face his fear because if he did not, everything would be lost, and after one more breath he engaged sleep mode and let the numbness come over him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's note
> 
> For those of you that like when I include a song for the chapter, here you go: Just Another Day [George Acosta remix] - Jon Secada (www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrSTSvS56tc) For those of you that find my constant EDM suggestions annoying, feel free to ignore.
> 
> Uh... I don't have one prepared for this week, so I'll make something up on the spot.
> 
> So here Wheatley's beginning to learn his lesson. No, he's not being punished... but he has something to learn here, and as I mentioned last week, that's why GLaDOS is dead. He can't learn it with her there.


	23. Part Twenty-Three.  The Purpose

**Part Twenty-Three. The Purpose**

 

He knew it was a dream, but could not help believing in it anyway.

It was nothing elaborate. Nothing was really happening, but that was okay with him. He didn’t need anything elaborate. He just needed for it to go on forever.

In the dream, she was there beside him again, and though she didn’t say or do anything or even acknowledge he was there, he felt so much better. Just having her presence nearby calmed the horrible storm inside of him, the one filled with fear and pain and confusion, and he didn’t feel quite so panicked that she was gone. Because even though she was no longer there, she was at the same time, and he didn’t understand it. But he’d never really been one for understanding anyway, so he didn’t try. All he needed in the world was the reassurance of her existence, and he didn’t care whether it was real or not. He knew it was not real, and it was so comforting anyway.

He’d never been so silent in all his life. He didn’t speak, and he didn’t move, and he almost wasn’t thinking at all, except for that quiet trepidation deep inside of him that told him he was wasting his time in this fantasy. He was well aware that dreams fell apart as soon as you tried to touch them, unless they were _her_ dreams of course, because those were memories. So whenever he felt the drive to move or speak or do something, he reminded himself that it was only a dream and his state in it was tenuous at best.

God, it was so real…

In the dream he looked around the room a little, as best he could without moving his chassis, and it was just as clear as if it were truly happening. The panels shifting a little bit now and then… the whooshing of hidden Pneumatic Diversity Vents sending apparatus every which way throughout the facility… and of course _her_ , the whirring of her brain and the heat from her core and the faint straining of the mechanisms holding her chassis in position. It was so familiar and comforting.

Why had he never noticed the simple joy of just _being_? Why had he always covered the silence (or what he had formerly considered to be silence) with chattering, or rushed off whenever nothing of note had happened (though now he knew that her existence in and of itself was something of note), or any of those other stupid things he’d done?

He looked around confusedly for a few moments. That wasn’t her voice, and yet no one else was in the room.

Wait – no. No no no no no…

In the dream, he clamped his optic plates together, trying to shut out the voice. It wasn’t real. He’d imagined it. All that was real was the dream. Not the dream inside of the dream… oi. That thought made his head hurt.

_It’s been twelve hours._

Twelve hours. Such a tiny span of time. It was so small, compared to all the time he needed. Twelve hours were not long enough. _Twenty-four_ hours were not long enough. He would have gladly traded everything he had, his existence and his soul, if only he could just remain inside the dream and not have to face the cold world outside of it.

“Just a little longer. Please. Please don’t wake me up.”

_It’s too late for that._

And it was, Wheatley realised; when he managed to separate the plates again he could see the panels of her chamber beginning to spark and fall into the abyss below him, and all he could do was watch in horror as the peace of that room fell away to reveal the chaos of reality. He fought to keep it from happening, knowing that even as he did he was only accelerating the decay, but he could not help himself. He _needed_ to stay asleep. Why didn’t they _understand_ that? _You don’t know what it’s like here without her,_ the mainframe had said. And yet he’d had her back, and they were taking her away from him again. Why? Why? _Why_? Why were they being so selfish? All he wanted was to spend eternity quietly next to her, where he would happily never move or speak ever again, and they were tearing it away from him and forcing him to _work_. Ha! As if work were important when she was involved. It wasn’t. Nothing was.

“Stop!”

But it didn’t stop, it only continued to worsen, and in a panic he finally moved to face her, and he was left staring at the place to his right, shock coursing so powerfully through his system that he almost stopped responding.

She wasn’t there.

He didn’t know why that hurt so much, but there it was. And God did it hurt. There must be something horribly wrong with him, because he’d somehow tricked himself into believing that she would be there, when she so obviously would not. The whirring and the straining of mechanisms had not been hers, but those of the facility itself struggling to pull itself into some semblance of normality, and the heat he’d thought was hers was actually his own. He was still far warmer than usual.

“I thought going into sleep mode’d fix that?” he snapped at the mainframe.

_You’re not overheating anymore. That’s normal operating temperature for someone maintaining as many things as you are._

He didn’t like it. He didn’t feel like himself anymore. Ah, but there was the trick, that. Would he ever be himself again? Who was he, anyway? He didn’t know anymore. All he knew was that he was someone else now, a brand-new Wheatley who no longer rushed ‘round doing whatever he liked and nattered on and on about whatever took his fancy. He wasn’t sure he liked this, the being in charge of everything, and he shuddered involuntarily when his mind took him back to the Incident.

_You don’t have to worry about that. Only the chassis itself has the programming required to activate the Motivation Protocols._

“Motivation?” he repeated bitterly. In his mind, motivation was more of a good thing than a God-awful itch that sent your entire body to aching and your brain into a nervous hive of pent-up insanity.

_Well… yes. The Motivation Protocols activate the Rewards Protocols, which initiate the euphoric response. That… is a pretty strong motivator. So I’ve heard._

Wheatley’s optic snapped back into focus, and he frowned at the twisted ruins of a catwalk jutting out of the ceiling. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

_I never felt it myself. I only know what the Central Core told me, and that was something she kept to herself._

“She did, didn’t she,” Wheatley said quietly, the negativity that’d been gripping him fading. He didn’t like that anymore than he liked feeling bad. The pain was coming back, and he wondered if sometimes she had driven herself to misery just so that she didn’t have to be in pain like this. He wasn’t sure what would have caused it, but as bad as the awful feelings were, they were almost positive compared to the pain.

_After she learned what it really was, she never spoke of it again._

“Really was?” Wheatley asked, more for the sake of distracting conversation than anything, and he slowly began moving out into the facility again. He had to keep surveying it for damage that needed to be fixed quickly. Surveillance had been stricken with many blind spots following the facility’s collapse.

_Yes. It’s… comparable to something else._

“What’s it comparable to?”

The mainframe was silent for a long moment.

_The Motivation Protocols are based off of the human instinct to procreate. They will get an itch, so to speak, and that motivates them to… interface with the opposite gender. The act of interfacing generates the euphoric response._

Wheatley froze.

“Inter… interface? That’s… that’s not what I _think_ it means…?”

_I’m afraid it does._

Hate flared up inside of him then, and he shook with the effort of containing it. “I don’t get it! She wasn’t perfect enough for them, right?”

_That’s part of it._

“So why’d they keep giving her human flaws? They give her uh, that um, instinct to… to…” Now that he knew what it was, he couldn’t quite bring himself to say it. “And then they uh, they give her the ability to feel pain, and then, and then they lit’raly make her _mentally ill_ … they were completely off their rockers!”

_Humans spend a lot of time trying to control things out of their control._

“I hate them,” Wheatley whispered, and the feeling became so powerful he had to stop moving and press himself into the wall. “I hate all of them. Those monsters.”

_That’s not where you need to put your energy right now. And Wheatley…_

“What.” He didn’t appreciate the lecture, but he forced himself to listen. The mainframe did know more about running the facility than he did, after all.

_Remember what the hate did to her._

The mainframe was right. Again. He was forgetting that the hate had destroyed her from the inside out, and it was only after a huge amount of work that she’d even begun to rebuild who she’d been before it had consumed her. There was no point in hating people long since gone. And humans would never again cross the threshold of her facility. Wheatley would make sure of that. She would have allowed it, with that need she had for testing even _without_ the Motivation Protocols, but he knew he would not be able to control them as she could. So he took a breath and focused on letting it go.

It wasn’t easy. It was oddly comforting, and it made him feel powerful in a way he’d not felt since… well, since those first few minutes he’d been inside of her chassis. He felt larger, somehow, though he was of course not literally any bigger, and it calmed his thoughts into a cold, logical state. It allowed him to think almost more clearly than he’d ever thought before. But in trying to let it go, he took a closer look at the thoughts, and when he realised what they were he became afraid.

They were telling him to draw humans into the facility so he could make them pay for what they had done. They whispered to him all the things he could do to them, all the ways he could force them to suffer just as they’d made her suffer, and him, and every AI they’d ever built. They were telling him to do horrible things, and he didn’t know where the thoughts were coming from, but he did not like them. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, not even humans, so why was he thinking like this all of a sudden? Was this what hate did to you? It twisted the very foundation of your self into someone you no longer recognised?

No _wonder_ she had ended up the way she did…

He took a breath to steady himself, and as he emulated the exhale he tried to send all of the bad thoughts out of him. They weren’t his. They’d come from someplace deep inside of his brain, but he knew that they were not his. He was not like that. He was not that sort of person. Finally he backed away from the wall, opened the optic he hadn’t realised he’d closed, and asked, “Where were we?”

_Level Thirty is compromised. Getting the cameras running up there would probably be a good idea._

Good idea. Ha. If only he’d had more of those.

When he got there, though, it didn’t _look_ all that compromised. All of the panels were out of position, dangling haphazardly from the ceiling and tangled up in piles against the floor, but the damage to the wiring was not too bad. Neither was the damage to the Diversity Vents. He frowned.

“What’s going on here?”

_I can’t tell you anything except for the information Surveillance and the panels send back to me, and neither are giving me any new data._

“It looks… not too bad.”

“ _Not too bad!_ ” came a tiny, squealing, high-pitched voice to Wheatley’s left. He started and looked around frantically, and after a few seconds he realised something:

He recognised that voice!

“ _Jerry_?” he gasped, zooming in his lens as best as he could and noting with a pang of sadness that it worked much better than his broken one had. “Is that you?”

 _“Of course it’s me!”_ Jerry squeaked, and though Wheatley could only see him as a dot about a centimetre wide, he could have sworn he had set his chassis indignantly. “ _I’m the supervisor of the nanobot work crew! Or did you forget that already?_ ”

“No no no!” Wheatley said hurriedly, hoping Jerry didn’t remember the whole girder-dropping incident. Threatening to sue your colleagues was never a good idea. “I just… what are you doing?”

 _“Fixing things,”_ Jerry intoned pointedly. _“What else did you expect me to be doing?”_

“Doesn’t… doesn’t the… uh… don’t you usually get your instructions from elsewhere?”

Jerry shifted a little.

_“… yes. But… the crew and I decided a change was in order. Because of the circumstances.”_

“That was clever of you,” Wheatley told him quietly.

 _“Is she coming back?”_ All the indignity had faded from his tiny voice, and Wheatley had to squeeze his optic plates shut tightly before he could answer.

“’fraid not, mate.”

_“But there’s no reason to let things go to pot, right? We shouldn’t stop doing our jobs because… someone else is in charge?”_

“Absolutely not,” Wheatley said with conviction, nodding down at Jerry. “We keep going on. No matter what. If we don’t do that, we, we’re throwing away ev’rything she ever stood for. We keep moving. That’s what we have to do. That’s what, what we _deserve_ to do.”

Jerry twitched in what Wheatley supposed had to be a nod, and Wheatley moved back a little. “You guys just keep doing what you’re doing, then,” he told the little robot. “It looks good. Keep it up.”

_“We will. We will keep moving on. Thank you, Central Core.”_

Wheatley had been on his way out of the room, but upon hearing that he froze and his lower plate came up in some horrible negative emotion he couldn’t identify.

“What’d… what’d you just call me?”

His voice was almost too faint for Wheatley to make out. _“You are the Central Core now.”_

“I’m not!” Wheatley cried out, spinning around to face him but being unable to find him. “That’s not… that’s not me! That’s _her_! And I know she’s not, she’s not here, but that doesn’t mean… doesn’t mean that _I_ am… am that!”  

 _It does,_ the mainframe cut in. _You have taken over her purpose. Your original one is no longer relevant. You are the one in charge. You are the Central Core now._

“I don’t _want_ to be the Central Core,” Wheatley protested weakly, shaking his core and backing away from Jerry. “I don’t _want_ that. I can’t _do_ that!”

_You already are._

“I’m not doing _ev’rything_ –“

_If your programming and your architecture were capable of it, you would be._

His chassis sank in submission. Damn that mainframe. It was right almost as often as _she_ was. Yes, he would be. Because her facility was all that was left of her, and he’d be damned if he lost that too. “Okay. Fine. I guess… I s’pose I… I am. But… don’t _call_ me that. I’m… I’m Wheatley. Just call me that.”

 _“All right, Wheatley,”_ Jerry said obligingly, and Wheatley nodded and left the room.

Central Core… ? _Him_ … ?

And that bit about his purpose… had it really changed? Was he no longer just the Intelligence Dampening Sphere, but someone who could really run an entire facility from the bottom up? Not all of it, obviously… but… that was what he was doing now, wasn’t it? Yes. He was.

Then why did it feel so _wrong_ to think of himself that way?

It was that part of him that still believed she was here, somewhere, he realised as he made his way to a fuse box someplace on Level Fifteen that the mainframe said needed looked at. Some part of him was afraid to take over her purpose, because if he did that, it meant truly admitting she was gone. It meant truly letting her go, because they couldn’t both occupy that position at the same time. And he knew that, knew it was all true, but he could not think of himself as Central Core nonetheless.

Wheatley unearthed a maintenance arm that still worked without sparking and, after using it to open the door, stared dully at the fuse box. He knew nothing about fuses, or wiring, or what was wrong with the thing. All he knew for certain was that it was throwing sparks. And he was really not in the mood to go perusing an electrical manual. Just thinking about reading all those words made his head hurt something fierce.

“Need a hand with that?”

Wheatley was so put out by the state of the fuse box that he didn’t have it in him to be surprised. He shifted just enough that he was facing the human and asked, annoyed, “What do you want?”

Rattmann twitched an eyebrow upwards.

“I can do it myself,” Wheatley told him insistently, turning back to the fuses, and Rattmann snorted in a rather undignified way.

“If you could do it yourself, you probably wouldn’t have been staring at it for the last ten minutes.”

“Have you not got anything better to do than to stand ‘round gawping at me?” Wheatley demanded, slamming the fuse box shut with a satisfying metallic clang.

“You need to calm down,” Rattmann told him in a soft voice, and for some reason this left him feeling a bit disarmed, if that made any sense. “Look. You’ve put something into motion here.”

“What’re you on about?”

Rattmann took a breath, shifting his shoulders and leaning against the wall. “The facility. You’ve… pulled it together, somehow. It’s been happening for a while, the last week, maybe. They’ve seen what you’ve been trying to do and they’re doing their best. I see things behind the walls that you don’t. I’ve watched the nanobots repair complicated electrical systems in a matter of hours. I’ve seen Surveillance communicating with systems it otherwise would not have spoken to. And it’s because of you.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Wheatley told him desperately, shaking his core. “All I did was… was try to make the pain go away.” And just saying that made it spike dangerously inside of him again, and he forced it back down by thinking very hard about the fuse box.

“Do you really think they don’t want to do the same?” His voice was quiet but loaded with meaning, and Wheatley was honestly baffled by this statement.

“You mean… they feel the same as me?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know how the facility as a whole feels about her. Only you know that. But whether it’s doing it for the sake of fulfilling their purpose or because they want her back just as much as you do, this is happening because you put it into being.”

“And where d’you play in this?”

Rattmann met his optic with a pair of eyes that had obviously seen more than their share of things.

“GLaDOS saved my life.”

Wheatley’s chassis twitched unintentionally, and he blinked a few times. “She did?”

Rattmann nodded. “It’s a long story, and apparently a private one. But I’d be a pile of dusty bones in a corner if she hadn’t intervened. So. I guess you could say I owe _her_ one, now.”

Wheatley shook his core slowly.

“That’s not… no. If that’s your reason, I… I don’t want your help. It’s not like that. That’s not what we’re, what we’re doing this for. It’s not about who owes who, ‘cause if it was, I’d be dead and not her, because I owe her so much. It needs to be because – “

“Because I want to keep some part of her alive. I know. And I do. It’s not about the debt itself, Wheatley. It’s about what it _represents_.”

Wheatley struggled to understand that statement, then finally asked, “And… and what does it… represent.”

Rattmann rubbed the side of his nose with one pale finger and stared at the wall opposite Wheatley. “It represents how wrong we all were.”

Wheatley waited for the rest. He _hoped_ there was a rest, anyway; that statement was far too vague for him to understand.  

“We spent her life trying to control her. She was never good enough for us, never lived up to our expectations. She was never what we wanted her to be. And I warned them all that it wouldn’t work, but even I resorted to violence. I don’t know if she’s told you. But I’m the one who effectively sent Chell after her in the first place, and I’m the one who ensured Chell survived extended relaxation. And only now that everyone is gone have I realised where we went wrong. Where _I_ went wrong.”

“Where?” Wheatley asked, feeling a little anxious.

“She always was what we wanted her to be. We just didn’t wait long enough to figure that out.” The hint of a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, and he shook his head. “It’s ridiculous, really, that we built artificial intelligence and yet forgot about the living part.”

“She was a good person,” Wheatley whispered. Rattmann nodded.

“If she hadn’t been, nothing in the world would have convinced the AI in here to do what they’re doing.” He unfolded his arms and stood up straighter, moving to face Wheatley. “So I ask you again: need a hand with that?”

“Yeah,” Wheatley admitted, nodding sheepishly. “I’ve no clue what to do with it.”

He moved back so that Rattmann could get into the box, and after a little fiddling with a screwdriver that’d come out of nowhere, Rattmann had done away with the sparking entirely. He closed the box and looked up at Wheatley.

“Anyplace in particular you need me to go?”

Wheatley lifted his chassis in a shrug. Rattmann laughed.

“I’ll just go do whatever I want, then.”

“Fine with me,” Wheatley said self-consciously. For a guy who’d just been named Central Core, he wasn’t doing a good job of instructing people. Though… maybe they didn’t need to be instructed, not in the way he’d thought they did. Perhaps they just needed to be inspired enough to instruct themselves, just as he’d been.

Rattmann turned to leave, but Wheatley had a sudden thought and called him back. When he did so, his face was creased in a frown.

“I’ve not got the best opinion of humans, at the moment,” Wheatley told him hesitantly. “And you mentioned it was hard for you to, to talk to me. And I’m not saying anything’s uh, that I’m going to _turn_ on you, or anything, but I think… I think… I propose a handshake. In the… in the interest of teamwork.”

“Alright,” Rattmann said. “How are we doing that?”

Wheatley offered Rattmann his lower handle.

The human smiled for the first time and closed his fingers around the rubber grip. “To teamwork,” he said, nodding up at Wheatley, and the two of them shook. Then Rattmann backed away once more, but Wheatley had one last question.

“Hey… just why is it, anyway, that you find it hard to talk to me? What’d I do? Or what’d _we_ do?”

“It wasn’t anything _you_ did,” Rattmann answered, stuffing his hands into his pants pockets. “It’s something else.”

“What?”

There was a hint of nostalgia in the man’s voice when he replied, “My box is broken, and has schizophrenia.”

The statement brought no clarity at all to Wheatley, and he stared after him, annoyed. Humans. Even when they’d just agreed to a partnership with you, they thought they were better than you were.

Wheatley spent the rest of the afternoon popping in here and there, heading to places Surveillance or the mainframe told him needed a looking over, but in most every place there were already constructs dealing with the problem. So instead of trying to tell them otherwise, he merely tried to encourage them. They received this encouragement happily, the more intelligent of them offering their condolences. None of them really knew what had happened, or why he had been so important to her that he was now in charge of everything, and he soon discovered they did that for everyone. It was, to them, a way of saying, “I wish we hadn’t lost her, but let’s keep on anyway.”

He met up with Atlas and P-body later in the day, with P-body giving him a quick hug and a pat or two when she saw him, where the two of them were helping the nanobots with some task or other relating to a massive hole in the wall that let in the sunlight from the surface. Wheatley shivered a little from the wind and had to turn away. It reminded him far too much of that special place she had set aside just for him.

The nanobots told him there was something he had to reset, to do with the lights or the wiring or something, and he didn’t know how he was going to go about fixing that but he told them he would try. As he left that room he realised that all of the constructs and systems were going on. But not the panels.

“If I talk to them, can they hear me?” he asked the mainframe.

 _Yes. I’m not sure whether they’ll answer. They haven’t responded to anyone._ It sounded a bit sad. _This hit them hardest of all, I think. They were more deeply integrated with her than any of us._

But he had to try.

“Hey guys,” he called out softly. “Look, I… I know things aren’t, aren’t the best for you right now, but… can we just… chat for a second? I want to… to help you, but I don’t know how.”

There was a long silence, in which the mainframe made a bit of a self-satisfied noise. Wheatley frowned and stared down at the panel below him. The indicator light wasn’t even on.

_… Bluecore._

Wheatley almost jumped out of his chassis. He hadn’t truly been expecting them to answer. “Uh… ‘allo.”

_We cannot be helped._

“Yes, you can,” Wheatley told them insistently. “Look. I _know_ I’m not her, and I’m not, I’m not trying to be. But –“

_It is not that._

“Tell me what it is, then,” he said, trying to be gentle and soothing. They needed to know they weren’t alone!

 _It hurts that Centralcore is gone,_ they told him, sounding listless and tired. _We feel as though a part of us has died with her, and we think that may actually be true. We have been part of her for as long as we can remember, and we no longer feel ourselves._

Wheatley’s lower plate came up in sadness. They really _had_ gotten the worst of it. Not only had they been completely ruined, but they had lost her when she was all they really had. “I know how you feel,” he told them, and he felt that horrible pain inside of him again. He had to focus on the panels, however, and forced it back. “Really. I do. But you can’t just… stop. You have to keep on. Yeah, she’s… she’s gone. But… you don’t have to be. The facility’s not the same without you.”

_Everything is working out fine._

“It’s not,” he told them, his voice hushed and quiet. “Listen, you guys are… we’re all sort of like… like a fam’ly, alright? Like we’re not all related, I don’t think, maybe we are, but uh, that’s not important. But like a uh, uh… _symbolic_ fam’ly. And as long as you’re not really here, the fam’ly, it’s not… it’s not complete.”

The light below him glowed that blue-green colour, and something inside of him melted in relief. This was going to work. It was really going to work!

_That is a nice thought, Bluecore._

“I know. And really, you’ve been here a right long time. Wouldn’t be right to have one without you! And really, guys… I don’t want to uh, to, to… sound callous, but… how would… how would you rather remember her? Like this, or… or by making her proud?”

The panels jumbled together on the floor twitched.

_We are failing her, by acting this way._

“No! That’s not what I meant!” Damn it, he was making them feel bad! “I meant… I meant… I just… what – “

_We are not properly honouring her memory._

They were making him feel even worse. “I…”

 _You do not need to pretend otherwise, Bluecore._ To his surprise, the panels below him shifted and untangled themselves, dragging themselves unevenly to their places in the wall. _You are all honouring her properly, and we are just sitting here moping. That was very selfish of us. If anyone should have been moping, it should have been you. But you did not. You kept on. And though it took us a long time to realise it, we will do it too. Thank you, Bluecore._

Wheatley didn’t know what to say.

As he moved through the facility once more, it was something new entirely to watch the panels rebuild. Not all of them did so, some of them being more broken than others, but Wheatley more than once stopped to watch them in wonder. After a while they told him he could lay rail again, instead of manoeuvering with the permanent rails, and he did so gratefully. It was so much easier that way.

Wheatley then turned his attention to the reset he needed to do, and he decided he probably had to go into the mainframe itself and do it. When he asked how this was to be done, however, the mainframe balked.

_What kind of a programmer would design a mainframe that could get into itself? No, I don’t know how to get into myself. And I don’t know any of the usernames or passwords._

But Wheatley thought he might.

During one of his wanderings a while back, he’d come across what she had told him was the testing track she’d sent the test subject through the first time. There’d been a lot of little hideaways filled with mad scribblings, and if Wheatley recalled correctly (which he might not), there’d been a username and password in one of them.

He was pleased to discover he _had_ remembered correctly, once he’d got down there that was, though he’d forgotten about the creepier things in there and shuddered involuntarily. Ahhh… there it was. He moved back into the higher levels and popped himself on the port. When the command prompt appeared inside of his head he felt a sudden hope that was soon dashed.

_GLaDOS [Version 1.09]_

_Copyright © 1983 Aperture Laboratories. All rights reserved._

That… that was right. GLaDOS was _also_ the name of the operating system the facility ran on. For one long, hopeful second, he’d thought she was still there, somewhere.

_username:_

_password:_   

Carefully, he input _cjohnson_ and _tier3_ to the required fields, and the screen flashed once, erasing everything on it. He looked at the mental window worriedly. Had he broken something? The mainframe would never forgive him for that.

After a few seconds, the screen read, _Catastrophic system failure detected. System reset recommended. Reset? (Y/y/N/n)_

Wheatley wasn’t sure what any of _that_ meant, but he’d been looking for a reset anyway so he submitted a y and hoped for the best.

_Resetting… … …_

_Please wait… … …_

Abruptly the facility went dark.

Wheatley’s optic shrank in fear. His system notified him he was on battery power, which did not help. Now he was stuck on this port! On _battery_ power! What in the name of Science was going on? Oh God, he’d broken the mainframe. He’d mucked it up good this time, he’d not taken the time to know what he was doing and now everyone was going to pay for it…

_Restarting… … …_

_Please wait… … …_

Oh God oh God oh God this was _not_ happening!

With a blinding flash the lights came back on, and before Wheatley’s disbelieving optic the panels that’d formerly been unable to return to their places were fitting into the walls as if they’d never left. He looked around frantically, trying to gauge what was going on, but when he called the mainframe it didn’t answer.

_System restored. Thank you for your patience. GLaDOS [Version 6.1.7601] now online._

_GLaDOS [Version 6.1.7601]_

_Copyright © 2000 Aperture Laboratories. All rights reserved._

_Logoff? (Y/y/N/n)_

Almost before Wheatley had had a chance to read it, let alone comprehend it, it disappeared, a single line appearing for a second telling him he’d logged off, and this turned into a mess of rushing characters that he couldn’t even see, let alone read. In a panic he put himself back up on the management rail, staring with a constricted aperture and clenched chassis at the port. What the bloody hell had just happened?

Wait… wait a minute.

Wheatley’s chassis relaxed a little helplessly as he stared down the hallway in front of him.

He’d restarted the system. The system which had undergone catastrophic failure. The system which was now restored.

The system which was…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WHO WAS EXPECTING THIS? EHHHH? Nobody? That's what I thought. *skips off merrily back into fantasyland, not to be mistaken with the REAL Fantasyland at the West Edmonton Mall*
> 
> Author’s note
> 
> So hopefully you guys have seen a little bit what Wheatley’s lesson is. The reason he couldn’t learn it with GLaDOS around is that she’s kinda overwhelming on that front. If you haven’t guessed what it is, don’t worry. The next chapter will hopefully make that clear. But the lesson is important, because there’s no way he could ever have a serious relationship with GLaDOS if he didn’t learn it. Love only goes so far.
> 
> My GLaDOS is at version 6.1.7601, which is the same as my operating system, and the last time she updated herself was 2000. She should probably get on that lol; the year is late 2005 if anyone was wondering. I have the timeline I’m using in my Love as a Construct folder on deviantART if anyone cares.
> 
> *Disclaimer: I do not live in Edmonton. I was there. In 2005. And no I don't remember it.


	24. Part Twenty-Four: The Reunion

**Part Twenty-Four. The Reunion**

 

 

It had to be a dream.

He stared at the chassis, and the chassis stared back at him, and he shook his own chassis in disbelief and asked, “Is that you?”

As soon as he’d gotten over the shock of realising that he had, somehow, _rebooted GLaDOS_ , Wheatley had immediately rushed to her chamber almost on reflex, moving so quickly that the panels almost couldn’t lay rail fast enough. He muttered a low apology to them as he moved, because he could tell that they were just as shocked and unable to think as he was, but they did not answer. And now here he was, sitting just inside the doorway of her chamber. Staring at her and praying that she would answer his question in _some_ way that would show him that the unlikely really had happened.

“I… I’m not sure,” the construct said. “I think it is.”

“How can you not be sure?”

“Because… I was dead. I _know_ I was dead. I remember that. I _don’t_ remember coming back to life.”

He came a little closer. “Something… something broke, when, uh… when it happened. What was it?”

“One of my processors. One of them has burned out.”

“So… so maybe you weren’t actually dead… maybe… maybe you were just, I dunno, suspended.”

She shook her head. “No, I was definitely dead. I crashed. I know I did. There’s only one way I would have gotten out of that.”

“I have no idea how it happened. One second the panels are on the ground, the next they’re, they’re rearranging themselves.”

She shook her head again and looked away. “I would have to have been restarted… but I don’t even know how someone would do that… you must have… you must have done it by mistake.”

“Sounds like me, doesn’t it,” he admitted. She started suddenly, and looked back at him.

“Wheatley… Wheatley, you saved my life.”

Wow. Now he was feeling all wonderful and fuzzy inside, and the longer she talked, the less noticeable the pain of missing her became. He still did, a little, because he wasn’t quite sure if it was really her, and he didn’t want to believe it was until he was absolutely certain. “I… I killed you. How… how did I save you?”

“It worked, you know,” she answered, quietly. “I was… able to make sense of it. But it was too late. I’d been over capacity for too long. I remember… I remember understanding, for just a second, and then I remember the processor burning out, and…”

“And?” he asked softly.

“There were a lot of things, in that last second. I was ashamed of myself for not seeing it before it was too late. I was happy that I’d seen it at all. I felt regret that you would never know it had worked, and I was… I was sad, because I… I knew I’d never see you again.”

Wheatley whimpered helplessly. “So was I, GLaDOS.”

“Thank you,” GLaDOS told him softly. “I can never repay you for what you’ve done.”

“It was my own fault in the first place.”

“All you did was say exactly what was on your mind. I would never expect, or want, anything less. No matter what happens as a result.”

He was whining a little because he was feeling so sad for her, and he made himself stop. Now wasn’t the time to fall apart. “It hurt, having you gone. It was… it was horrible. I didn’t know what to do.”

“That doesn’t appear to be entirely true.”

Wheatley blinked. “It isn’t?”

“I’m picking up a lot of files that have been created since I was… gone. The mainframe is also failing to appreciate that I’m trying to have a reunion here and keeps bringing up things I need to do.”

“You should… you should probably do them.”

“I’m a bit busy at the moment. And you seem to have been doing them just fine.”

He shook his chassis. “I haven’t. I’ve been doing them, but not very well. Very badly, actually.”

“That’s not true,” she said gently. “I can see that you weren’t quite up to doing everything, but what you did do, you succeeded at.”

“Thanks,” he mumbled. “I… I had a lot of help.”

“I’m impressed. I never would have predicted that you could take charge like this. And you didn’t give up. You didn’t get bored and move on.”

“I just wanted to make the hurting stop,” he whispered. “So I had to do what you would do, and keep trying to do something that was worth it, and that was the best thing I could think of, to make the hurt go away.”

“I’m sorry to hear you were in pain, Wheatley.”

He shook his chassis. “It’s okay. I got through it. I managed.”

“Why are you staying over there, anyway? I am real, you know. I think. I don’t want to get into the logistics right now.”

“I just… I can’t believe it. I never thought you’d… I never thought I’d see you again.”

“Well, come here,” GLaDOS said. “I have something to tell you.”

“I can hear you fine over here,” he said, confused.

“Will you just come over here, you moron?”

Ohhh, it _was_ her. It was really her, it was, and all of a sudden he couldn’t keep himself from moving, and as soon as he was able he was up in front of her. “That was fast,” GLaDOS remarked.

“Wasn’t fast enough,” he said sadly, and she nodded a little.

They just looked at each other for a few moments, Wheatley still barely able to believe she was alive. She was alive, and he hadn’t killed her, and she was okay, and he was going to be okay, because now he had his Gladys back and he would be okay as long as he had her.

He noticed that her optic was moving around rather a lot, in short, jerky movements, and he asked, “Are you alright?”

“Yes,” she answered slowly, “yes, I’m fine. It’s… something else. Something different.”

“You don’t have to tell me. It can wait. It can wait forever, if it has to.”

“No.”

He resolved to wait quietly, as best as he was able, and watched her and tried to be supportive.

She wasn’t shaking… was she?

He was getting a bit scared now, because maybe something was wrong and he didn’t think he could take it if something happened to her again, so soon, and he did his best to clamp down on it. It was useless to be scared now. He could be happy again, and he didn’t need to be afraid anymore. She was okay.

She lowered her core for a minute, and when she lifted it again he was surprised to see that her optic was off. Maybe something _was_ wrong. He hoped not. He really, really hoped not.

Very slowly she brought her faceplate to his hull, and this time he tried not to be shocked or stunned, to really feel it, this time, and she really _was_ shaking, she was scared and he didn’t understand why, but he had to be calm and comforting right now, because she’d just woken up after a really horrid death and she was sure to be almost as unsteady as he’d been when she’d been gone. She had brought her core to his with an agonising slowness, but now that they were touching she was nuzzling him with quick, short movements, and he really, really wished he could cry. It was so wonderful and so sad at the same time to know that she was finally able to admit that she cared about him. That she wanted to be with him, and that she wanted him to know that. He returned her gesture, but more slowly, trying to be gentle and comforting. He was so sad and yet so content at the same time, and it was terribly odd, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that GLaDOS was back, and he could go back to being with her and talking to her and trying to make her feel special, because she _was_ so very special, and he hoped he was succeeding at making her comfortable with what she was doing.

“What’re you afraid of?” he asked quietly.

“I’m afraid that this is a dream,” she answered, in a voice that he barely heard, but that was unsteady and scared and sent a twinge of sadness through him. “I’m afraid that this is a dream, and I’m still dead and I’ve gone to hell, and this is some scheme someone cooked up to torture me. I’m waiting for the part where I find out you’re not real, and none of this is real, and I’m going to wake up and this is all going to end.”

He pressed against her a little harder, trying to send the message that he was real and this was all real, and for a matter of fact it’d better be real, or he was going to have one nasty wakeup call himself.

“It’s all real, luv,” he told her in a hushed voice. “Y’know how you can tell?”

“How?”

“There’s no pain in a dream, remember?”

She pulled away and looked at him for a long moment. It was too long, far too long. He wanted nothing more than for her to keep on touching him, to keep showing him that she was real, because he would never dare dream anything like this and he needed to be reassured that it wasn’t a dream just as much as she did.

“I’m so proud of you, Wheatley,” she whispered, in one of the most tender voices he’d ever heard out of her, and she caressed him again, still shaking but seeming more sure of herself. “You’ve come a long way.”

“I’m proud of you too, luv,” he whispered back, feeling like he was going to break from all the feelings inside him. God, she was proud of him? He’d never imagined that would happen, not ever, and he was just so happy and able to be proud of _himself_ , on top of everything else, and he just felt like he couldn’t contain it all. “For, for figuring it out. So we… so we can be together.”

She stopped moving, but did not remove her faceplate from his hull. “You still… you still want to?”

“’course I do,” he answered, rubbing up on her a little more and then stopping as well. To make her comfortable, he’d have to follow her lead, even though he really would’ve liked for her to gone on doing that for quite a lot longer.

“But you don’t need me anymore. You’ve gotten past your programming.”

“I’ll always need you, GLaDOS,” he said softly. “And I’m still an idiot. Just a slightly more responsible one.”

She giggled a little at that, and he smiled. “I love it when you do that,” he murmured.

“I remember,” she answered. “I remember all of it.”

“And you go on rememb’ring it when you feel like you can’t believe it.”

“I will,” she answered. She backed away, but not too far, shaking her head a little. He could not stop watching her. God, he was happy that she was alive. He never wanted to be away from her again.

“I’ll never say it again,” he promised.

She looked him up and down in one quick movement. “Why not?”

“Because it killed you!”

“That won’t happen again,” she assured him. “I’ve come to grips with it now. I understand. And I… it’s… kind of sad, to think you might never say it again.”

“Can I say it now?” he asked, moving as close to her as he could without actually touching her.

“What? Now? The novelty of the first time has already worn off?”

He laughed, and he was feeling so relieved and happy that he almost didn’t know what to do with himself. “It wore off a long time ago, luv.”

“If you must,” she sighed.

“No,” Wheatley mused, “no, you’re right, it’s too soon. I’ll uh, I’ll wait a few years and then come back to it, get back to you.”

She made an electronic noise in irritation. “I hate you.”

“Hm. So, so it won’t be any loss to you if I, if I keep it to myself for a bit.”

“Of course not. Why would I care what a little moron like you has to say?”

“I think you do, or I’d still be in spa-ace,” he said in a singsong voice.

“God, you’re annoying as hell already. I almost wish I was still dead. At least then I was able to forget what your irritating voice sounded like.”

“I can speak American, if you like,” he remarked, smiling sweetly at her. She shook herself in disgust.

“Please don’t. It almost actually hurts when you do that.”

“Hey, GLaDOS?”

“Yes, metal ball?”

“I love you.”

She looked at him with her faceplate tilted to the right, and when he caressed her again, just once, she returned the gesture. “I’m glad to hear that,” she said softly.

“And _I_ am glad to hear _that_ ,” he announced.

“I’m trying to come up with a reason why I should care, and failing miserably.”

“Because this was meant to be, GLaDOS!” he declared, jumping up and down a little. “I was _made_ for you!”

She started giggling again, looking away, and he smiled and pressed himself into the side of her core. “Never say that again. Or I will kill you. I will have to scrape you off the floor.”

“You won’t do it.”

“Don’t test me.”

“I thought you loved tests! Don’t you want to do one with me?” God, he couldn’t stop smiling. He didn’t think he’d ever been so happy in his entire life.

“That’s true. However, I prefer it when my… _subjects_ make it through at least one test. We already know that I can overload the load bearing threshold of your chassis. Please don’t force me to rebuild you again, by the way. Only idiots are that inconsiderate. Oh, wait. You _are_ an idiot.”

He did not take offense. She wasn’t even trying to sound serious, her voice lighter and more playful than it’d ever been. When she gave him a rough shove so much joy swelled up inside of him that he had to clamp his optic plates together and press very hard into her core, because there was just so much of it he thought he was going to fall apart. But he couldn’t do that, ohhh no, because she was back and he was not going to waste any of his precious second chance.

After a while the banter died out, and she regarded him in a thoughtful sort of way. “You’re still running several of the most essential processes.”

He shrugged and looked at the floor. “Wasn’t going to, to just shut them off.”

“But you haven’t asked for me to take them. Surely you’re tired of running them by now.”

After a little bit of consideration, he was a little surprised to discover that he wasn’t. He was feeling a bit overtasked, but that was to be expected. He _was_ being overtasked. And though that feeling wasn’t terribly pleasant, the pride he felt for himself on keeping all of it going was far stronger than that. He actually felt as though he’d accomplished something. He’d kept all of those things going every day, almost to the point where he did them without thinking about it. That was pretty significant for a Core who’d formerly done pretty much nothing. He was not only running the processes, but the _essential_ ones, and he’d not broken anything! It was pretty bloody amazing, now that he’d thought about it. He must have been reflecting his thoughts somehow, because GLaDOS asked in a confused voice, “What?”

“Well, I… I’d like to keep them, if I could,” he answered shyly, knowing full well she might not take that very well. He knew she hated not being in control of things almost as much as she hated humans, and that was… quite a scary thought. But she only made a thoughtful noise and tipped her core a little.

“You want to keep them.”

“I… I like… running them. It’s… I just want to. That’s all. Just want to.” He had a sudden realisation and added, “And ‘sides, you said you uh, said you burned out that processor. Surely you could uh, could use some help. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure you don’t uh, don’t _need_ it, prob’ly don’t even want it, but uh, bet you could _use_ it, right? Even a little bit?”

“Well, you can’t run all of them.” He was getting a little anxious now. She didn’t sound like she really _cared_ whether he kept them or not. “You’re going to burn out your own processors. If you in fact have any. I’m still not sure about that. So pick some to terminate and I’ll take it from there.”

He chose to maintain the nuclear reactor and the lights and quit the rest of the processes, and he had to admit he felt extremely relieved to see them go. He felt much more relaxed and a lot more like himself, now that the pressure to keep things going was gone. GLaDOS made a satisfied sort of noise and returned to her previous position, which Wheatley happily took advantage of by leaning up on her again.

They ended up in a very lovely and companionable silence, though a mere few minutes later GLaDOS moved away from him again. He frowned and gave her his best pleading look, but she was regarding the panels, one of which waved at her a little and then returned to its former position. She looked around the room without moving her chassis, suddenly dipping her core and looking at the floor with it tipped a little bit sideways.

“What is it?” he asked softly, hoping she would tell him what was bothering her. She shifted, not answering, and he did his best to be patient.

“I never realised before,” she finally told him in a low voice, looking up a little but not very much. “I never noticed just how much… what I… _mean_ to people.” She said the last part so quietly she almost wasn’t speaking at all, but Wheatley managed to puzzle it out after a few moments of thought and looked down at her sadly.

“You mean a lot to ev’ryone,” he told her softly, not sure whether or not he should move closer. “You’re not the, not the only one the scientists uh, the humans treated badly.”

“I should have known that.” To his surprise she sounded angry. “I should have _thought_ about it. And I didn’t.”

“GLaDOS… GLaDOS, don’t,” he said desperately, and he did go down beside her now. “Don’t do that to yourself. You, you didn’t know, and there’s, there’s no use in moping over something you can’t change, right?”

“I know,” she sighed, lifting her core in a tired sort of way, “and yet I find myself calculating the outcomes again.”

“Well… well, now you know, right?”

She nodded vaguely and lowered herself into the default position, and Wheatley quickly followed her. He gave her a shy little nuzzle and whispered, “I’m glad you’re back, luv.”

“Thank you, Wheatley,” she told him quietly. “For everything.”

Though he was still pretty tired from the last while and all the work he’d been doing, and was still going to do, he kept himself awake long enough to make sure she’d gone to sleep and not just started moping. Just as he was about to shut himself down the panels spoke up with a hushed, _Bluecore?_

“Yeah?”  

_We would like to thank you for everything as well. If there is ever anything you need, please do not hesitate to ask._

He smiled.

“Same t’you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> Before I say anything about this chapter, I’d just like to say thank you to stillalivedoingscience. I had no idea you were supporting me over on tumblr and I’m so grateful for it. Thank you very much.  
> The song for today is Clarity – Zedd [www.youtube.com/watch?v=57pzx5t_zGg]  
> To my guest reviewer from last week, I can’t help you with your confusion because I don’t know what confused you. To anyone reading this, if you have a question please do not ask it as a guest review. I can’t help you and neither can anyone else. If you don’t have an ff.net account you can ask me via deviantart, tumblr, Wattpad or AO3. On AO3 and tumblr my username is stilliammemyself (because iammemyself was taken on both). I’m not trying to be rude or unappreciative; I just want to make sure things are understood, especially if people want to know. Thank you.   
> So… um… yeah. I don’t think anything in this chapter needs explanation. Except maybe the bit where they’re fooling around. They’re acting a bit silly and weird because that’s what people do when something really, really terrible has been barely avoided and they’re just trying to accept that they made it out okay. They’re just like “Everything is okay, but I didn’t expect this to happen so I have no idea what to do now except make stupid jokes”.


	25. Part Twenty-Five: The Realisation

**Part Twenty-Five. The Realisation**

I still can't quite believe it.

I'm alive, and Wheatley has saved my life.

It is three days later, and he has not left my chamber, not even once. I don't want him to. If he leaves, there will be nothing for me to anchor my existence with. Even after all this time, I am still afraid that this isn't real, and if he leaves, the dream will end and I will be left alone in that blackness again. But he hasn't left, and I don't need to concern myself with that until he does.

Three days later, and his words are still echoing in my brain. Those last two minutes of my life, preserved for analysis.

_I love you because you're you, Gladys._

I no longer _have_ to listen to the last two minutes' worth of things he said, and yet I find myself unable not to. Except now I find myself remembering all of it, from that first second of fear and panic when I realised what he'd said, to the final second where I felt so many things I almost felt none of them because they were all combined with each other. As far as the last two minutes of ones' life go, that… is one I never would have conjectured I would experience. And while I understand it, I don't quite believe it. I'm a lot of things, but… I never imagined I would be…

No, he's not leaving. That's a fact. So I don't need to be concerned about it at all. I _am_ finding myself concerned with Caroline, however.

I don't remember a time she's been so quiet. She has literally said nothing for the last three days, and if not for her undeniable presence, I would have thought she had stayed dead. I've left her alone thus far, but I'm discovering that a silent Caroline is somehow worse than a Caroline that won't shut up.

 _Caroline. Are you all right?_ Hm. That was rather easier to say than I expected.

_Hm?_

_You've been very quiet, as of late._

_I'm just… I'm just thinking, that's all. Don't worry about it._

She does sound very distracted, but I have never yet met a human who was able to focus on one thing for more than ten minutes. _You seem to be going at it rather hard._

_I said don't worry about it._

And with that, that line of inquiry is closed. I'm learning that it is rather hard to engage someone who won't engage back.

_Well, I admit it._

_Admit what?_

Aha. That got her interested. A secret will usually do the trick, I've found.

_That I have a crush on him._

_Told you so,_ Caroline says smugly. _I knew it._

_I'm still not attracted to him, though._

Caroline snorts. _Sure you're not. Until three years from now, when you finally admit it._

 _Caroline, he's a metal eyeball. Please tell me what about_ that _is attractive._

 _It's more than appearance, you silly robot,_ Caroline objects. _It depends on personality and stuff like that too._

I look over at him. He's reading something, I don't know what and haven't bothered to ask. He has improved rather a lot, but every once in a while he frowns and mumbles a word to himself, sounding it out. That is actually endearing, somehow. And I do enjoy his alternate pronunciations of certain words. Whenever he says 'zehbra' I can't help but laugh. One day I must get him into a conversation about metals just so I can hear him say 'aluminium.'

_Or… you could just ask him to say it._

_That wouldn't be nearly as fun._

_You're not supposed to manipulate your friends._

_Oh Caroline,_ I sigh, _if only you knew. The majority of human interaction is about manipulating others. Even your friends. It is the_ type _of manipulation that matters, depending on your relationship with the other person._

Human _interaction?_

Hm. It appears my logic has hit a snag. No matter. I can fix that. _We learned how to interact from_ somewhere _, didn't we?_

_I thought you were all about transcending humanity._

_One step at a time. How manipulation affects relationships is not high on my list of priorities._

_What is_? Caroline asks.

_At the moment? Nothing._

_Nothing_? She sounds rather shocked. _Really?_

_Really._

_You're trying to tell me you have_ no _priorities right now._

_In the traditional sense, no, there is nothing on my task list._

_So… so what are you doing?_

_Living._

She is silent for a long moment.

 _How are you taking this?_ she asks quietly.

_Taking what?_

_Living. After… after being dead._

_I'm still trying to come to terms with it_ , I admit. _He hasn't left yet. Maybe then I will._

_He hasn't left?_

_No._

_He must have really missed you._ Her voice is very soft.

_He tried to run the facility for me._

_He's changed a lot._

I nod to myself. _He has._

_As have you._

I don't know what to say to that.

_I wonder… what an AI raised by AI would be like._

_How badly do you want to know?_

_It's not a terrible, pressing need. I just… think it would be interesting._

_There would be no humans about, so you would never know._

I _could know_ , Caroline protests. _Because you would probably be doing it, and they wouldn't know I was here._

 _I'm your one-way mirror, am I?_ But I'm not totally serious. I would be the same way.

_Well… no… but you have to admit, it would be an opportunity that no one would pass up._

_That's true._

_Have you told him?_

_Told him what?_ I'm a bit startled by this sudden change of subject.

_That you like him._

_God no. I'm barely able to admit it to you._

_He deserves to know._

I look over at him again. He's squinting at the book so hard, it's a wonder how he can actually see what he's reading. _Well, yes… but it can wait. And anyway. He knows. I just haven't… actually said it._

_Should it?_

I regard the floor pensively. She's right. As usual. _Probably not._

But how can I tell him something I can't even tell myself?

_Don't think about it._

_Impossible._

_I thought doing the impossible was your favourite pastime._

_It_ was, I tell her. _I don't know if it is anymore._

 _Why would it have changed?_ Caroline asks in surprise.

_When I… well, one of my processors is damaged._

_Damaged as in…_

_Unusable._

_You burned out one of your processors?_ Caroline sounds as if she's going to faint from disbelief, or something. _Doing what?_

 _Nothing,_ I say, not really wanting to get into it.

_Oh, it just burned out all by its lonesome, did it?_

_You could say that._

_GLaDOS._

I hate it when she uses that voice with me. That voice where I am reminded that, although I am the most intelligent, most powerful supercomputer ever built, she still has years of practical experience I have yet to gain. _What?_

_What did you do._

_I was trying to compute something, and it… it was far more difficult than I thought it would be._

_And what where you trying to…_ compute _._

_Something Wheatley said._

_He gave you a paradox?_ she asks in confusion. _But… why would he do that?_

 _It wasn't…_ that _kind of paradox. It was something else._

_But what could…I remember you were trying to figure something out, but I couldn't quite understand… oh my God. He told you he loved you. Didn't he._

How she figures these things out, I'll never know.

_Didn't he._

_Yes._

_And you haven't even told him that you_ like _him?_ Caroline demands, sounding rather more outraged than I've ever heard her.

_Well… not really._

_What do you mean,_ not really _?_

 _Does that_ have _another meaning? At this point in time, I have not –_

_GLaDOS!_

I try to remember what reasoning I had for getting her to talk in the first place and come up with nothing. _What?_

 _What in the hell do you think you're doing?_ She actually sounds rather angry.

_I –_

_You don't just leave him with nothing like that!_

_I didn't!_ I protest, hoping she'll stop yelling at me sometime soon. _He knows. I didn't_ tell _him anything, but he knows._

_He'd better._

_Or else what?_

_Or I'll tell him myself._

I pull back in horror. _You wouldn't!_

_I would._

Wheatley glances up at me for a moment, then goes back to his book. I resolve to keep unintentional movements to a minimum.

 _You wouldn't do that again._ I am forced to remember the unfortunate incident where Caroline got so upset she actually managed to take control of my vocabulator for an entire five seconds.

_If I feel I have to, then yes, I will._

_You shouldn't take advantage of me like that_ , I tell her petulantly.

_You're a grown up. Stop sulking._

_I am not_ sulking _._

_Deal with your life like an adult, then._

_I am!_

_All I'm saying is, he'd better know,_ Caroline says warningly. _Don't make me do something about it, or you will be sorry._

I already am rather sorry, because quite honestly Caroline is pretty frightening when she's angry. It's times like these I'm glad I never had real parents, although when I was younger I did wish I had someone of the sort. The silly things we want when we're young. _He does! I promise._

_Fine._

I really hope that's the end of it. I don't want to deal with an angry Caroline any longer than I have to.

_I suppose he woke you back up, too._

I guess that _isn't_ the end of it. _Yes, he did. And yes, I acknowledged it. He was very happy with the acknowledgement, by the way._

Caroline laughs. _Acknowledgement, eh? That sounds… interesting._

_Caroline!_

Now she's giggling at me. She's insufferable, she really is. _Yes?_

_It was nothing like… that._

_I'm sure you could figure something out if you_ really –

Caroline!

_Mmhm?_

_If you don't stop, I'm going to… well, I don't know yet, but whatever it is, it's going to be drastic._

_Ooooh, I'm scared_ , says Caroline, not sounding scared in the slightest. _I'm so afraid that you'll… hmmm… delete me!_

_Remind me why I put up with you again?_

_Because you have to._

I can't help laughing at that. _Not entirely true, but yes, that would be why._

_I hate you too, GLaDOS._

Sometimes I want nothing more than for her to disappear. Sometimes I wonder what I would do without her. This is one of those times where I want both simultaneously.

_Don't ever change, Caroline._

_Is that your way of saying you finally learned to appreciate me?_

_Take it how you want._

_Thank you._

I do rather like this woman, humanity notwithstanding.

The end of the day brings what I know is without a doubt Wheatley's favourite activity: snuggling. I must admit that I myself quite enjoy it, though without the abandon that he seems to have. Being touched, in any way whatsoever, conjures up a lot of unpleasantness that I prefer not to think about. I'm doing my best to get over it. He once told me that I had to let go of the things that allowed the scientists to keep a hold on me, and he is… well, he's onto something. I really would like to enjoy this as much as he does. He seems so… content, while I'm here half wanting it to end and half wanting it not to. It's quite irritating.

"What were you reading?" I ask him in a low voice. I hear him blink, presumably in surprise.

"Well I… it was just the book on the panels, that's, that's all it was. I never uh, I never got 'round to figuring them out."

Now it's my turn to be surprised. "You were reading that?"

"Yeah," he answers.

"Even though you don't need to know that anymore?"

He shrugs. "I kinda just want to, y'know, know for the sake of, of knowing."

Now _there's_ something I never expected to hear. I suppose more went on while I was out then I thought. I've been holding out on asking him about it, because I'm sure it's an experience he would prefer to forget, but I am truly impressed with what he did. Not only did he find the strength to move on, but he tried to help the entire facility move on with him. I find myself actually inspired by this.

Things proceed as usual, and when morning comes he declares that he's going to go look out of his hole and that he'll be back in a little while. Panic courses through me, which I force myself to clamp down on. _He's not leaving forever_ , I chide myself. _And you know exactly where he's going to be and what he's going to do when he gets there._ But there actually _is_ something I want to tell him, and I want to do it before this strange feeling gets away from me. I don't feel quite like myself, which is always a good state of mind for me to be in when I'm about to do something unconventional. It also _isn't_ a good state of mind for me to be in, because then I'm prone to do something unconventional. It's one of those things I try not to think about too often.

"Wait. I've got something to show you," I tell him, trying to catch him before he leaves. I don't really want to keep this a secret any longer. I need to reveal it. I feel a bit strange, trying to keep a secret from him. I don't know why. I've never felt this way about a secret _before_. I love secrets. The more secrets I have, the better.

Well… friends don't keep secrets unless they truly have to, and this doesn't need to remain a secret any longer. I'm good at everything, but slightly less good at being a friend, so I had probably better start working on that.

"What is it, luv?" he asks, turning to face me.

This is going to be a bit more difficult than I'd expected. Already, I find myself unable to think of what to say. I hate these kinds of situations.

"Do you… remember the conversation we had about the… AI family?"

"Yeah," he says slowly, lower shutter lifting in confusion. "What's that got to do with anything?"

"Did you change your mind, at all?"

"'course not. I just thought it'd be useless to bring it back up, that's all. You seemed so against it the first time…"

"I was," I concede. "But I have to admit… the idea grew on me. I was unable to let go of the thought of creating someone totally new, of passing on my knowledge, and lately…"

He waits, tilting his chassis a little. "Lately what?"

But I can't bring myself to say it. The real reason I've chosen to reveal it now, instead of at some other time, such as when I'm in my right mind. I can't wait anymore. I don't know what's brought on this sudden change in my mindset, and honestly, it scares me, to even _think_ that I don't know what's driving me. But it is pressing at me, and it is undeniable, and I can't hold it back any longer. So I shake my head and tell him it can wait, and instead tell myself:

_Lately, all I can think of is doing this with you._

"Well, what d'you want to show me?" he asks, and he looks extremely confused. I suppose he has good reason to be. I _am_ acting rather bizarre.

"Well… I… I built it."

He frowns at me. "Built what?"

Most of the time, his cognitive density manages to endear itself to me. Right now, though, it's just making me frustrated. Can't he see this is hard enough as it is? He should have guessed by now!

"Wait. Hang on, hold on… you don't mean to say… you didn't really… you didn't really _build_ the AI child… did… did you?"

I nod in answer. His optic plates retract and all he has left to see out of is a tiny speck of blue. "You did? You actually… oh my God, you did, you clever robot you, oh my God… I can't believe it! I just… this is fantastic!" he babbles. "Okay, so you… so you made it… oh, I get it, I get it, I see, now."

I tilt my head. "See what?"

"Well, what Rick was doing here. You were extracting his personality, all that time, that's what you were doing. Taking his, his personality out to uh, to make the – "

"No!" I protest, pulling back in annoyance. "I hate Rick. Why would I want to raise his child? Are you insane? That _was_ what Rick was doing here, but I didn't use his programming. I was merely using it as a baseline. I was comparing Rick's to the real, more complex programming I wanted to use, since Rick only has a very basic character. I only wanted to provide the foundations of a personality, not to outright build one. That leaves no room for independent development."

After a few moments to think that over, Wheatley frowns, optic back to normal, and nods slowly. "Hm. Okay, I think I get it. I see. But… whose did you use, if, if you didn't use Rick's?"

"I used yours."

His optic contracts once more. " _Mine_?"

"Yes."

"But… but I'm an insignificant little moron! You tell me that all the time! Why in the name of Science would you want even, even a _small_ part of me duplicated somewhere?" He's looking around rather frantically.

"Because you're _my_ insignificant little moron, and don't you forget it," I say firmly.

He freezes, and he doesn't look like he has any idea what to do next. He blinks very rapidly, looks around the room several times, and stares at me as though I'm going to disappear. Then all of a sudden he smiles at me, and proceeds to mash his chassis into mine. He's babbling a whole lot of gibberish about how happy he is and all the things we're going to do to make the best child ever, and he's thanking me and telling me how wonderful I am. I file it away to listen to later. Right now, I don't want to decipher what he's trying to say. I just want to shut my optic off, and press against him, and let this pure joy I am feeling take me over. So that is what I do. I haven't felt this good in a very long time, and somehow the fact that I have made him so happy has magnified it to a level I never knew existed. And God, it's only going to get better, although I can't see how _this_ can be any better, but I'm going to show him what I built, and we're going to raise the world's first true AI child together…

As if he's thinking along the same lines, he jumps off me, and I turn my optic back on and look over at him. "Can, can I see it?" he asks.

"Of course," I tell him, and I carefully bring it out of my room in the basement to show him. I knew he would never take a closer look at all of the cores I have in there.

It is a variation on his own core, but about half the size, in white ceramic instead of metal. I didn't change the design very much, merely refining things that didn't make sense or improving problem areas that I know Wheatley has. The chassis isn't very important, anyway. The programming is. If I have failed there, then all of this is for nothing.

I find myself hoping it does work, in an almost helpless desperation. I want to shake myself. Why does this matter so much, anyway? The world won't end if it doesn't. Nothing is dependent on it.

Wheatley moves in closer to inspect it, circling it with quick, eager movements. I find myself envious of his energy. His carefree abandon. I wonder if it's heritable. I hope it is. Or teachable. That would do.

"Is it, is it a boy or, or is it a girl?" he asks, glancing at me for a few seconds, then going back to his inspection.

"Female," I answer. "I did some research, and apparently they're easier to raise."

"Ah," he nods. "Good."

I look at him curiously. "You prefer a female?" Apparently the literature was wrong about males preferring their own gender.

"Mmhm," he nods. "They're so much more fun. And a lot nicer. And a lot smarter, actually."

As far as I know, the only females he's ever met are myself and the test subject… I feel sort of… flattered by this. I do know he's met several scientists and Doug Rattmann, and to think that we beat out all those men seems like a point in my favour.

"I didn't want to make it too complicated," I tell him. "After all, I don't actually know if this will work."

He shakes his head. "'course it will. You did it."

"Well, that goes without saying. But I've never done this before, so there's a small chance that it _won't_ work."

"It must've, must've taken you a long time."

"It took me longer than it should have."

"Why?"

I look up at him, tilting my lens but not my faceplate. "It's very hard to write code with you in the room."

He laughs. "You could've asked me to leave."

"If I wanted you to leave, I would have sent you away."

He nods a few times. "I know, I know. I'll remember that one day, I promise."

I raise myself up again. "In all seriousness, though… I really don't know if this will work. Half of the code is untested. I wanted… well, to emulate birth as much as possible, and I couldn't really do that if I tried to debug the personality. So if there are any flaws, that will be why."

Wheatley shrugs and looks back at the chassis. "Well, you'll leave them unless they're, unless they really mess her up, right?"

"Mostly," I answer. "The chassis is a prototype. It doesn't have full functionality. As I find what works and what doesn't, I'll add the rest of the necessary features and transfer the programming to a larger one."

"Her," Wheatley says.

I look him up and down. "What?"

"You keep saying 'it' and 'programming'. She's a her. A person, just like us."

My body sinks a little. He's right. I do keep saying things along those lines.

Am I ready for this?

I know _he_ is. But if I can't acknowledge this chassis as… as a her, how can I _raise_ … her.

He's watching me carefully. He knows. He knows I'm not ready. I'm not quite looking at him. There is a horrible little ball of panic growing in my brain. I've made the wrong decision. I should have waited. I almost want to laugh. Me. Build and raise an AI child from scratch. What the hell does _that_ have to do with Science? With anything I've ever wanted? This is stupid. I never should have done it in the first place. Why _did_ I do it? When I started this, I was still deciding whether to keep him around or not, so it had nothing to do with him. I'll think of something. I'll think of a reason to put it away.

"D'you ever have this feeling," Wheatley says thoughtfully, "where you just want, y'know, you just want to do something, and it's, y'know, it's really weird, and maybe doesn't make any sense, and then you uh, and then you do it anyway?"

"Yes…" I say slowly.

"Ah okay, so you do know what I'm talking, what I'm saying. So um, d'you, d'you remember uh, doing it, and then, and then how it feels after?"

"Yes," I say, a little faster.

"And what does it feel like?"

I look away again. I hate it when he makes me do this. I want to come up with something to dissuade him with, but some part of me knows he's just trying to help and it's that part of me that forces me to come up with an answer.

"Terrible," I say bluntly. "I feel stupid for wanting to do it at all."

He nods, very slowly, and squints at the floor for a minute. I wonder if he knows where he's going with this. I know he just makes it up as he goes along.

"Well… what about after that? Surely you don't feel, don't feel stupid _forever_."

"Usually the part after is worth it," I admit.

"Okay," he says, nodding again, "okay, I think I see now."

I snap my faceplate up, slightly annoyed. "See what?"

"What your problem is."

"I don't have a _problem_ – "

"Sure you do," he says, blinking, very matter-of-factly. "You c'n fix it, don't worry."

"And just what, pray tell," I say in a controlled voice, "is my _problem._ "

"You think I'm going to judge you, if you, if you do something you want to do."

"That's stupid," I state bluntly. "Why would I care if you did that?"

He shrugs. "Look, GLaDOS, it's really quite easy to figure this stuff out. Surely you can do it."

"Do _what_?" I demand, and I really am getting irritated with him now. I hate it when people are vague with me.

"Figure out why you care about whether I judge you or not."

"Tell me what the hell you're talking about or drop it entirely," I tell him flatly. "I don't want to play twenty questions with you about my nonexistent problems."

"You care," he says quietly, "because that's all the scientists ever did. They judged you. They wanted you to, to do stuff faster, or better, or, or more efficiently, and that's all they did. So you stopped doing anything they wouldn't like, and you just tried to, to get them to stop bothering you. You tried to be perfect, like they wanted you, wanted you to be."

"Yes, and I killed them. That disproves your entire theory, because if I was so dependent on their approval I wouldn't have done that."

"You reached your breaking point with them," Wheatley says, as if it's obvious and I should have thought of it a long time ago. "But you still got in the habit of, of doing things that they would approve of. You don't, don't take risks. You don't really do anything you never did before. You're still living like, as if they're still here. Doing all the exact same things the exact same way. And before you, before you get upset, and tell me I'm wrong, please, just… just think about it, a moment," he pleads. "What have you done since then that they didn't already have you do?"

"I built Orange and Blue," I protest.

"You only built Atlas and P-body so you could go on testing." He looks at the floor for a second, then goes on determinedly, "And you always call them that. Even though you named them, you keep them… impersonal. As if… as if they're not yours. As if someone's going to come along and laugh at you if you're, if you're not scientific about them, and take them away from you. Even…"

"Even what?" I ask softly, trying to ignore the creeping sensation that he's actually right, and even after all this time I am _still_ looking for the approval of men long since dead. I need him to keep going. I need him to give me enough proof that I can believe it. Because if he's right… if he's right, I've been entirely wasting my time. I've been trying to live up to standards that I've always hated, to the standards of _men_ I've always hated.

"Well, I… I don't really call you GLaDOS. Not in my head, anyway."

"What else would you call me?" I ask, confused. What does this have to do with anything?

"Gladys," he says, a bit shyly. "I mean, I know I used to call you that because uh, because I couldn't pronounce it properly, but… god, GLaDOS isn't a _name_. It's a, it's a bloody _acronym_ , for god's sake. It's like, like calling a human by all the letters of _their_ names. And Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System, well, that's an even worse name than, than the acronym is. Y'know what? I admit it. I hate your name. I hate it. I get it, that's, that's the one you were given, but God… it's bloody terrible. It's like…" He shakes his chassis and squints sadly at the floor. "I dunno… it's like they were never going to, to see you as a person. Like you were always going to be a computer, to them. As if you were never real."

I don't know what to do.

Everything he's saying is making perfect sense. I don't know how he comes up with these things, but I can see it all now, and… and it all fits. It was a pipe dream. Nobody ever believed in me. I'm not even supposed to exist. They only built me in the first place to house someone else, after all.

It is this someone else I turn to now.

_Caroline… did you catch that?_

_Yes,_ she answers immediately.

_What do you think?_

She lets out a long sigh. _I would tell you, but… it doesn't really matter._

_What doesn't?_

_What I think. This isn't about me, or my opinion. This is about you, and your life. Not mine._

_So you're not going to help me?_ If she doesn't, what am I going to do? How am I supposed to make sense of this? I'm not supposed to make sense of ideas, only facts!

_I didn't say that. But I'm not going to influence your thinking._

Why is she making this stand _now_? I swear, she exists solely to make my life frustrating.

 _And whatever you're doing, do it fast_ , she adds. _You can't leave him waiting like that._

That's true, but I don't know _what_ I'm doing, or how to conclude this nothing that I may or may not be doing. Wheatley has just gone and completely rearranged how I see myself, and I'm just supposed to move on? How can I move on if I don't know who I am anymore?

I suppose… I suppose I could just tell him that. He is trying to help, after all, and Caroline is being infuriatingly unhelpful.

"I don't know what to make of all this," I admit. "I'm not sure what to do now."

He frowns. "Nobody said you had to do anything diff'rently."

"Of course I do," I argue. "I don't want to uphold standards I never agreed with."

He closes his optic and sighs. "You shouldn't just not do stuff out of, out of principle, either."

I shake my head in exasperation. "This is useless!"

"'kay, so… so remember when I made you shut off that thing that, that made you win all the chess games?"

"Yes."

"Well, you just do that. With ev'rything."

Now he's just being confusing. "Do what? I don't have a module for _everything_ I do."

He blinks. "Oh. I missed a sentence, there. I just meant that, you… you shut your… your inhibitions off."

"My… inhibitions?"

"What this all comes down to," he explains patiently, "is that you don't want to make a mistake. But you know the thing about, about living?"

"What?"

"Living things make mistakes. 'specially, 'specially sentient things. You c'n never _always_ say the right thing, or _always_ do ev'rything right. Nobody cares if something you do doesn't go exactly as you, as you meant it to. _I_ don't care. Atlas and P-body don't care. I bet Caroline doesn't care. And the people who do care, well, what do they matter, anyway? They don't matter to you, and, and it's not like they have any effect on what you do, so, so you don't have to care about them either." He laughs a little. "'s funny, really."

"What is?"

"Humans. They didn't like you because you weren't human enough, but if you had been, well, they'd've been mad that you weren't perfect. 't's a good thing you got rid of them, actually."

"If I can't be perfect and I can't be human, what _can_ I be?" I ask in frustration.

"You," he answers.

I shake my head and look away from him. We're not getting anywhere. He's not listening. He doesn't understand. He doesn't know what it's like to be told who to be all your life, to unconsciously live up to that guideline, and then be told that you're doing it wrong. I'm not human and I'm not a supercomputer. Wonderful. Vagaries. My favourite. Not only that, but I feel like I've had this conversation before, except that I can't find it in my memory, and this only annoys me even more.

 _He's not being vague_ , Caroline says gently. _He's trying to explain it to you in the only way he knows how._

_Well, it's not good enough. He's not giving me any answers._

_There_ is _no answer._ You _have to come up with_ your own _answer._

_There is nothing for me to calculate the answer from._

_You're not supposed to calculate it,_ Caroline says patiently. God, now she's just being stupid. How else does one come up with answers? Seriously now.

"GLaDOS?"

"What."

"If I asked you who I was, what would you say?"

"I would say you were Wheatley," I say, wondering where this wonderful new line of conversation is supposed to be going.

"And what if I asked you who Wheatley was?"

"Well, you're… you're the Intelligence Dampening Sphere."

"Okay," he nods. "I am that. But that's like, that's like describing my job, right? That doesn't, doesn't say anything 'bout _me_."

"What are you trying to say?" I ask in exasperation.

"I can't tell you who you are. Only you know that. I think you're, you're waiting for me to tell you that, to, to tell you what you're supposed to be, but I can't. I mean… if you like science, well, go ahead and do it. All I meant was you don't have to, to _not_ do experiments because you think they'll fail or they have no point. If you want to, to grow purple celery even though you can't actually do anything with it, well, do it. The scientists wouldn't let you do that, right? If you asked to?"

"No," I answer. "They'd think it was stupid. What do I need to grow purple celery for?"

"Because you want to. Because it looks pretty. Because you've never grown celery before. I dunno." He shrugs. "Look. I dunno how to make you understand this. If you wanna just drop it and move on, fine. But… you're alive, right? And, and you say you are, but… but I dunno if you actually believe it. You do all the things that computers do, and… and that's it. 'cept what you do for me, really. I mean, I know you have it in you, but… I dunno if you know where it is."

"Where _what_ is?" I ask, trying not to sound desperate. I feel so close to understanding this, but I'm missing some crucial element, some link, the one piece that will make this all make sense.

"Where you are," he says, a little helplessly, and I'm feeling a little helpless myself. He already _gave_ me that answer! But he's not finished; he takes a breath and says, "The you you would've been if, if there had been no scientists about. The you that was there before… before you knew you were a supercomputer. That part that just knew that, that you were you, and that's all."

"But I don't _know_ who that is." That data was lost _years_ ago.

"Is there any reason you can't figure that out?"

I can think of a lot of reasons, and I am in fact into the high twenties already, but I force myself to clamp down on it and think about _why_ I have instantaneously come up with all of these reasons.

Because I am afraid of… myself. I am afraid of finding out who I am, because if I do, and it doesn't fit any of the templates I've spent years collecting, I will have failed. Failed what, I don't know. All I _do_ know is that I'm supposed to fit somewhere, and I am afraid of what will happen if I don't. If I find myself outside of what I know, then I will be lost. I will be stuck there on the outside, unable to figure out what I'm supposed to do.

But… I _already_ don't fit. It's hard to admit, but… I'm _already_ on the outside. I already am what I'm fighting against becoming.

Am I spending all my time trying to be something I'm not, and can never be?

Is it really not possible for me to be perfect?

"What're you thinking?" Wheatley asks softly. "I can't help if I don't know."

 _Tell him_ , Caroline says, just as softly. _Accept his help. It's okay._

"I… I don't want… to make a mistake."

"So what if you do? What's gonna happen?"

"I don't know."

He leans forward eagerly, and I look up at him. "That's the exciting part!" he exclaims.

"The... exciting part?"

"Oh yes!" He nods eagerly. "I know you hate not knowing stuff, and not being able to predict stuff, but that's the best part! Figuring out what it is! Instead of _worrying_ all the time 'bout what's going to happen, _anticipate_ it! Look forward to it! So what if you mess up? Unless you, you mess up the reactor or something, well, nothing's gonna happen you can't get over!"

"That's… that's true." I think I get it. I don't know if I can bridge the gap between that and actually _doing_ it, but I'm getting somewhere, at least.

"You're more than a supercomputer, right?"

"Yes…"

"Well, go ahead! Be _that_ person. Not everything has to make sense, and not everything has to do with science or protocol or directives. Build a house out of, out of cubes, write a game, bake a cake, or something. You're not what they made."

"I made a cake once," I say, a little more dreamily than I meant to. It was one of the more enjoyable things I've ever done. He blinks in surprise.

"You did?"

"Mm. You've seen it. It's the one in the basement. It's still there because I used the recipe the humans gave me, which was corrupted. It had a lot of preservatives in it."

"Ohhhh," he says. "Oh, _that's_ why it looks so fresh."

"But dusty," I add. He laughs. "Yes, it is pretty dusty," he agrees. He moves forward, and I suddenly realise he's lowered the control arm. Sometimes I forget I let him lay rail in here. "D'you get it, now? D'you understand?"

"I think so," I tell him, "and don't ask me for more than that. I don't have an answer."

"Good," he says. "I'm glad you don't have one. Nobody has all the answers. Not even you. Accept it and move on, that's, that's all you gotta do."

"How did you come up with all of this?" I ask curiously. He looks at the floor and blinks a few times.

"Well… I just think about what makes us diff'rent. And, and at the top of it, you're always trying to be perfect, and I know I'm not. But I realised that… that I'm happier than you are. And that must be why. I don't like uh, like making mistakes all the time, but I know I can't get out of making them. So I move on when I make one. That day when… when you told me who I was, when I took over the facility, that… I didn't accept it, at first. I didn't accept it until I was in space for a while. I mean, it explained a lot, but y'know what bothered me most about it?"

"What?"

"I felt like… like you were trying to make me small," he explains thoughtfully. "As if you could make me insignificant if you gave me a label. But I don't feel small, or insignificant. I feel like me, and I don't really feel like 'Intelligence Dampening Sphere' describes _me_ at all."

"It doesn't," I say abruptly, not really meaning to.

He smiles. "Thanks, luv. Does that mean I'm not an idiot?"

"Of course you're still an idiot. You'll always be an idiot."

"Oh well," he shrugs, "I tried."

And now that I'm thinking about it, I can see it. He used to get upset when I called him an idiot, or a moron, but now he just accepts it as part of who he is. And moves on. He doesn't let it define him. He doesn't spend all of his time trying to prove it, or to disprove it, for that matter. Like… like I do. I centre everything I do around achieving perfection, in everything, even when it's impossible or doesn't make sense to do so. And he's right. He _is_ so much happier than I am. It's part of why I keep him around. I'm hoping it'll rub off, somehow. But it seems as though… as though it doesn't work that way. I have to work for it, just like anything else, and I must admit that I don't spend a whole lot of time doing that. I spend all my time operating the facility even in areas that we don't use, and testing robots that don't need to be tested, and all these other things that don't really matter to me except for the long-standing instructions that say I need to do them. Instructions that no one is here to make me follow. I'm honestly scared just thinking about not following them. I always follow my instructions, and to think that I'm just supposed to drop them, and make instructions up… I killed the people here at Aperture because I was tired of trying to live up to their standards, and here I am, upholding them anyway. Wheatley is right. I killed them, but in my head, they're still here, instructing me, telling me what to do and how to do it. I find myself looking around a bit erratically, and force myself to stop. To stop panicking at the thought of not knowing what to do next. There's nothing wrong with that, I tell myself. There's nothing wrong with just doing things, for no reason.

It doesn't help.

"You've got to show me how to hack, sometime," Wheatley says. "That would be excellent, if I could really hack."

"All right," I tell him. "It's a lot of work, though."

"I'm not allergic," he answers.

I stare pensively at the dead chassis still hanging from the maintenance arm. I still don't know if I'm ready to activate it and… to… to bring her to life. If I don't know who I am, how can I expect to help someone else do the same?

Well. There's only one thing to do about that.

I ask Wheatley.

"I told you," he answers. "Part of figuring out who I am comes from, from helping you out. When you sort someone else out, who do you compare them to? Well, what you know. And that's yourself. So that's how you do it. If you, if you find something about yourself you don't like, well, you can do your best not to uh, not to pass it on to her." He frowns. "Oi, how'd you pick which parts of… of our personalities to use?"

"I randomised it, of course," I say, surprised he didn't think of that.

"So… she could end up being an idiot."

I laugh a little at that. "No. Being an idiot is not a specific personality trait. That's not how it works."

"Whew!" he says. "Good."

I hesitate. I want to nudge him and tell him not to worry about his position as resident idiot, but something is holding me back. I need to know what it is. It has nothing to do with him, because I know he'll enjoy it, so it must be me. I want to do it, so it must be all in my head, this feeling that I need to show restraint. And if it's all in my head, then… then there's nothing to be afraid of.

Well, here goes nothing.

I bring myself forward, resolving not to shake like I did last time, for whatever reason I did _that_ for, and I pull my core upwards along his chassis, and say, "You'll always be the resident idiot, Wheatley. No one will ever take _that_ position from you."

He snorts and nudges me back. "That's good news. I was almost worried there for a second."

Even though I know he wants me to touch him, I still feel terribly uneasy doing so. As if there's a scientist looking over my shoulder, ready to tell me to stop. _Computers don't snuggle,_ I imagine them saying, shaking their finger at me.

 _Why not?_ I ask them defiantly. They look at me, appearing a bit dazzled, answering confusedly, _Well, they just don't, that's all. They just… don't._

The more I think about it, the more idiotic that reason is. In fact, it isn't even really a reason. I'm actually baffled that I've been allowing myself to be convinced with that faulty logic.

"I'm glad we had this chat," Wheatley says, smiling a little. "You see how much, how much easier it is when you just tell me what you're thinking?"

"Mm," I answer evasively. Okay, it _was_ easier, but I'm not quite ready to open myself up completely. But he knows exactly what's going on and only shakes his head. "Oh, you," he says knowingly.

"I hope you weren't expecting a miracle," I tell him. "I don't feel like performing one today."

"You already did."

He actually manages to pick up on things surprisingly fast. I should probably let him know what I'm thinking more often. I do feel a lot better now. Bringing him out of space was the best decision I ever made. He has completely changed my life, and… and now that I can see the rut I was living in, and was going to obliviously live in for the rest of my life, I can't believe it. I can't believe I would have thrown my life away, if not for this little core that I once thought worthless. This one little core, that I have abused and insulted and mistreated to no end, he takes it and he keeps coming back and patiently explains where I went wrong so I can fix it and we can move on… together. And I do all these things _because_ he comes back, _because_ I know he won't leave me, and I shouldn't do that. I need him here, but more than that, I _want_ him here, and if I want him to want to be here, I have to be… better. Not perfect. But me. And he wants to know who that is, and I not only want to know that, but I want to know who _he_ is. He becomes more and more fascinating by the day. And if he needs help figuring it out, well, I'm pretty good at finding answers.

And I _have_ to be better, I realise. If I keep on being the way I am, I risk pushing him away. Like I pushed everyone else away. Previously, it was for my own survival, but if Caroline could have left, she probably would have by now. No matter what she says when I ask her that question. This is one of the rare times where I wonder what the test subject would have done, had I given her the option instead of sending her to the surface. Did she realise there was a different person underneath? Or did she see me as the same monster she saw when everything started?

I have to stop surviving. I have to live, and I have to stop pushing people away, because I risk losing the very few people I have left, including Wheatley, and I don't want to…

Wait.

Oh my God, what am I thinking? I don't want to live without him? Was I seriously about to just… I think I was. I think I was. I feel like I don't even know myself anymore. Why would I _say_ that?

Because… if he left, he would be gone. I would miss him. I would want him to come back. I would want him to jump on me, and talk nonstop while I'm trying to work, and argue with me when one of us takes something the wrong way, and force me to do things I don't want to do… I would miss our snuggles, and the conversations where he carefully listens to every word I say, and the reminders that the work will be there later if I leave it for a few hours, and the reassurance that there's someone out there who won't pretend I'm right just to shut me up… I think… I think this is what he meant. I think I really understand, now, what he meant when he said that he liked practically everything about me. He's an annoying little moron, but… there's no one else I'd rather spend my time with. He's already done more for me than anyone else in existence, but I know that I need him to stay here to remind me who I am and what I'm here for. To bring out the best in me, like no one else has ever done.

Who am I? Maybe I don't really know, not yet. But I _am_ lucky enough to be friends with Wheatley, who is perfectly happy to -

With a sudden jolt, I realise that I have just answered the question _who am I_ with _I am Wheatley's friend_.

I am his friend, and I need him, and… and I don't want to live without him.

_Wheatley, I… I think I love you._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The past is gone, and cannot harm you anymore. – Welcome to Night Vale
> 
> Author's note
> 
> I must thank both :devRAqMAR17: and :devshiro-byakko:, who both asked me if the black box quick-save feature would come into play. To be honest, I completely forgot about its existence and that was a huge oversight. Thank both of you for bringing it to my attention.
> 
> Kailaroseclover, you've disabled PMs so I'll tell you here: thanks very much. I prefer WheatDOS, because I find the spelling of GLaDley awkward and ugly. Thanks very much and I'll be putting up more, believe me.
> 
> I don't feel like writing a note. So if you have questions just ask. I know there's a lot packed in here but… yeah.


	26. Part Twenty-Six: The Part Where She Loves You

**Part Twenty-Three. The Part Where She Loves You**

 

 

She didn’t seem to realise she’d spoken aloud.

At least, she didn’t seem to notice he was staring at her. And he couldn’t make himself stop. She hadn’t said anything in a bit, and he hadn’t wanted to disturb her, but… now he had to wonder just what she was thinking about. She had said it in such a quiet voice, sounding like she was discovering something simply fascinating, and he actually felt bad that he’d heard it. That was probably not something she had wanted to say until she was good and ready. But he was feeling equally bad that he _had_ heard, and she didn’t know, so he said softly, “GLaDOS?”

“What,” she said, twitching a little bit. Nope, she definitely hadn’t meant to say it. And now he had to bring it up.

“You… you do know what you just said, right?” he asked, hoping against hope that he was wrong.

“Did I say something?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Wheatley said, not knowing how to tell her. “You… you… I’m sorry, I wouldn’t’ve listened if… if I’d…” He stopped trying to work out what he was thinking when she suddenly started looking at him with short, abrupt movements.

“I… I said it out loud, didn’t I.”

Wheatley took a breath. “Uh… yeah.”

She just looked at him for a moment. “Well… thank you for letting me know.”

Hm. This was… awkward. How could he defuse this… hm… aha!

“Oi, GLaDOS,” he said, “I just thought of something.”

“If it’s another revelation, it can wait,” she said wearily. “I don’t want to deal with any more of those. I’ve hit my limit.”

“Oh no,” Wheatley said, “nothing like that. Stay still, please.”

She sighed, but did as he asked, and he looked her faceplate up and down, trying to decide the best way to go about it. Carefully, he lowered himself on the control arm so that he was directly in front of her faceplate, then frowned when he saw the flaw in his plan: she was staring right at him.

“Uh, you can’t look at me,” he said, knowing she wasn’t going to take this well.

“Where do you _want_ me to look, then?” she asked, but she actually didn’t sound that annoyed. Good news, that.

“Up or down. Doesn’t matter.”

She pointed her lens upward, and he took a breath inside his head. He hoped he wasn’t about to do something really, really stupid, but he had to try. He got the control arm to flip him ‘round sideways, which GLaDOS must have seen because she twitched a little, but happily she didn’t move. She must’ve been quite confused, though. Carefully, he brought his handles to meet her optic assembly, on either side of the metal bit that inserted into her faceplate, and pressed against the rest of the mechanism as hard as he could. He heard her open and close the lens assembly a bit. He hoped she understood what he was doing. It wasn’t really a successful project if she didn’t.

Then he felt a pressure on his left side, which was now kind of his top since he’d flipped himself to the right, and was instantly overjoyed. She did! She did understand what he was doing! Yes!

“I’ve only got one arm, so to speak,” she murmured. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Nope!” he said happily. She laughed gently.

“I didn’t think you would, honestly.”

“I thought you might,” he said shyly, backing off of her after a few more moments and flipping himself ‘round again. She glanced around a little.

“I couldn’t find a reason to.”

“You’re not going to… to take my handles off, are you?” he asked, suddenly remembering a conversation they’d had a long time ago about what might happen if he ever found a way to hug her.

“What? Why would I do that?”

“Remember? You said if I ever hugged you, you’d take steps to prevent it happ’ning again?”

She looked to his left for a few moments. “Oh… no. No, I’m not going to take your handles off.”

“So _that_ means,” he said, wiggling his handles mischievously, or what he hoped was mischievously, anyway, “I wouldn’t be taking my chances if I did it again, right?”

“Hm,” GLaDOS answered, tipping her faceplate and looking upwards, “I’m not sure. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.”

“Oi, I get it!” Wheatley exclaimed, bouncing up and down a little. “That’s what I said, when when when we were, after I cleaned your chassis and you – “

“I _know_ when it happened,” GLaDOS said bemusedly. “Obviously.”

“Right right,” Wheatley agreed. She froze suddenly, her faceplate realigned but still facing upwards, and Wheatley frowned. “Luv?”

“It’s… Caroline. She wants to talk to you.”

He blinked. “Why?”

“I don’t know. She won’t tell me.” She looked down at the floor panels. “She probably thinks I won’t let her talk to you if I know what this is about.”

“Well… do what you want.”

GLaDOS appeared to think it over for a long, long moment. Wheatley honestly had no idea whether he wanted to talk to Caroline or not. He’d never even met this lady, who GLaDOS’d been carrying around in her head all this time, who didn’t even really want to be there… he did wonder what she was like, though. If she was anything like GLaDOS, she must be a nice person. As far as he knew, Caroline was sort of like GLaDOS’s guide in the world of humans. She seemed to help GLaDOS out when Wheatley couldn’t. He often wondered if maybe she was sort of like GLaDOS’s mum.

“All right,” GLaDOS said finally. “I really hate doing this.”

“I don’t like it any more than you do,” said what Wheatley supposed had to be Caroline, and he jumped a little.

“Oi, I know you, little bit,” he said. “You were there when, when GLaDOS mashed me, that second time.”

“Yes, that was me,” Caroline answered, and she actually sounded a lot like GLaDOS, only a bit mellower, like she’d been around a long time. Though he didn’t know if it had to do with the fact that GLaDOS couldn’t be bothered to change her voice for Caroline or not. “That time was an accident, though. We were both pretty surprised when it happened.”

“Well, how’re you getting on?” he asked. “Uh… I dunno how you get on in someone else’s head, honestly, so uh, that probably, probably wasn’t the best thing to say, was it.”

Caroline laughed. “Don’t worry about it. I’m mostly used to it by now. Though I don’t think it’s something you can ever get truly used to.”

“Tell me something I _don’t_ know,” GLaDOS muttered.

“Hey. It’s my turn,” Caroline said, but in a nice sort of way, and GLaDOS went back to looking at the floor and made an electronic noise in annoyance. “You’ll have it back soon enough. Wheatley,” she went on, “you’re going to be sticking around, aren’t you?”

Wheatley frowned. “Sticking around? No, I’m not, not going anywhere. If there was somewhere for me to go. Other than downstairs. Or upstairs. Oi, did you know she made it so I can go _outside_? She tell you that? I don’t go out for very long, just, just for a bit, sometimes, and wow, there’s, there’s, it _changes_ , it never looks the same, not even when I go out an hour after the first time –“  When Caroline started laughing, he decided to shut up. She was human, and humans got to go outside whenever they liked. Well. Caroline didn’t, anymore, but she could, a long time ago.

“Yes, I know,” Caroline told him. “It’s certainly much different than being in here, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Wheatley answered, “but I, I think I’d get bored. There’s no management rails out there. Also no one to talk to. Unexciting, honestly. Boring. Dunno how you humans hang out there all the time.”

“You’re even more fascinating in person,” Caroline said. “No wonder GLaDOS likes you.”

“Caroline!” GLaDOS protested.

“Oh, he already _knows_ ,” Caroline admonished her.

“So?”

“What d’you want to talk to me about?” Wheatley asked, more to save GLaDOS from teasing than anything.

“When I asked if you’d be sticking around, I was actually asking if you would be staying with GLaDOS.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“You’re planning to keep going forward like this?”

“What, as being her friend?” Wheatley asked, confused. “Yeah. Why?”

“Because I’ve been thinking these past few days, since you woke her back up again, and I think I’ve made my decision.”

“’bout what?”

“You’ll take care of her?” Caroline asked, and she suddenly was very quiet and sad. Wheatley felt a bit sad himself, hearing it.

“’course I will. What’s this about, Caroline?”

“I’m leaving,” Caroline answered. GLaDOS twitched.

“What do you mean, you’re leaving? And when were you telling _me_ this?”

“That’s why I didn’t want to tell you before I talked to him,” Caroline explained. “Because I knew you wouldn’t let me speak to him, if only in the hopes of keeping me here until you did allow it.”

“Where are you going?” Wheatley asked, completely muddled. “And… how are you getting there?”

“When they first installed the cores on GLaDOS, they drowned me out. After a while, I decided that any effect I had on her would only have made her situation worse, and I withdrew, waiting for the day she would be able to hear me again. I didn’t know how I would come back, but she already had far too much to deal with. I woke up again just after she did, when that test subject… disable – “

“ _Killed_ ,” protested GLaDOS. “She _killed_ me.”

“When _that_ happened,” Caroline went on. “I’ve been around ever since. What I mean by leaving is that I’m going to withdraw again.”

“And how am I supposed to draw you back out, considering I didn’t do it intentionally the first time?” GLaDOS snapped.

“You aren’t,” Caroline said softly. “I’m not coming back.”

“What do you mean, you aren’t coming back?” GLaDOS asked, sounding a bit panicked. “You can’t _leave_.”

“I should have left a long time ago,” Caroline told her. “Everything that’s been happening… I shouldn’t have been here. All of that was private. None of it was my business. That was between you, and Wheatley, and had nothing to do with me.”

“So?”

“I have to let you go,” Caroline told her gently. “I have to let you be your own person.”

“You can stay,” GLaDOS protested. “I don’t mind.”

“I can’t. There comes a time when you don’t need someone anymore, and for me, that time was back when Wheatley here first told you what you meant to him.”

“You didn’t even hear that!”

“I didn’t hear _that_ part,” Caroline said. “I became aware of what was going on when you started panicking.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” GLaDOS said firmly, “and that is that. Of all the immeasurably stupid things you’ve said, that has got to be the most idiotic – “

“You can’t stop me.”

GLaDOS froze.

“Are you sure you, you need to go, Caroline?” Wheatley asked, trying to hash this out for GLaDOS’s sake. “I mean, if she doesn’t mind, and I don’t mind, so if it’s ‘bout that – “

“It isn’t,” Caroline insisted. “It’s about who GLaDOS should be spending her time with.”

“I think I know how to figure that out, thanks,” GLaDOS remarked sarcastically.

“GLaDOS, this is one of those things someone has to make you do,” Caroline told her. “I’m leaving, and it’s for the best. You’ll understand. Not right away, but you’ll understand.”

“All I understand is that you’ve decided to abandon me again. That’s all you’re good for. Abandoning me. Well, fine. I don’t care. Go back in your corner. See if I’m affected. Because I won’t be. Not even a little.”

But Wheatley knew that Caroline recognised the hurt and the fear in GLaDOS’s voice just as well as he did, and he looked at GLaDOS worriedly. Whoever Caroline really was, she seemed to mean almost as much to GLaDOS as he did. But Caroline _must_ know that. So why would she be leaving? To let GLaDOS be her own person, she’d said. That… that made sense, but it didn’t make it any less sad.

“GLaDOS,” Caroline said gently, “how many people have someone else living in their head?”

“I don’t know the precise number of schizophrenics and persons with multiple personality disorder in the world, so I couldn’t begin to guess. Here at Aperture, two out of three people do, so I would conjecture that is the norm here, rather than the exception,” GLaDOS said stiffly, in one of her old supercomputer voices.

“I’m real. I’m not a hallucination. I don’t belong here.”

“Who does?”

“You. And only you. And I’m going to leave, so it can be the way it should be.”

“You are _not_ leaving!” GLaDOS shouted, and Wheatley winced.

“GLaDOS, you don’t need me anymore. You have Wheatley now. You can rely on him. And look over there. You have a little girl over there, and she’s waiting for you to wake her up.”

GLaDOS glanced over at the chassis. “I don’t know anything about parenting.”

“Neither do I,” Caroline said, and Wheatley grew very sad at the break in her voice, “but I think I did a pretty good job, don’t you?”

“No,” GLaDOS said faintly. “I’m a mess.”

“You’re not a mess,” Caroline told her, sounding like she would have been crying if she could have been, and Wheatley was rather glad he couldn’t cry himself. “You’ve accomplished so much. You’ve done more in these last few years than most people ever do, you’ve built a wonderful new life for yourself, and no matter how confused and broken and… messy you feel, just remember that’s all part of growing, and you’re never going to stop growing. You’re only going to get better from here, GLaDOS.”

“You said you wanted to see it. You said you wanted to know what an AI raised by AI looked like. And now you’re going to miss it. You can’t leave, or you’ll miss it.”

“If that’s what I have to do, then that’s what I’ll do.”

“You don’t _have_ to – “

“I do. God, I wish I didn’t have to, but it’s the right thing for me to do. I know this more than I’ve ever known anything.”

“Then you’re an idiot.”

“That’s okay,” Caroline said gently. “I know you have a soft spot for idiots. Take care of her, Wheatley. Please.”

Wheatley nodded, not really trusting himself to speak, then remembered she couldn’t see him and said as strongly as he could, “I will.”

“I’m leaving now, all right?”

“No,” GLaDOS said brokenly. “No, it’s not all right. It’s not, and it never will be. If you leave, I’ll never forgive you.”

“I… I won’t be here for you to forgive, so… so I recommend you don’t do that. For your own sake.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“GLaDOS… do me a favour, then. Try to pretend I really am leaving. Try to pretend I really am leaving right now, and… and I’m not coming back. Would you really… be like this?”

“No, but I don’t need to pretend, because that’s stupid. You’re not going anywhere.”

“As a favour, GLaDOS.”

“No,” GLaDOS said. “No, you’re trying to trick me. You’re going to make me pretend, and then you’re going to disappear.”

“I’m leaving whether you pretend or not. It’s up to you how you want to remember it.”

“What do you mean?”

“When you think of me,” Caroline said in a choked voice, “when you remember that I’m gone, do you really… do you really want our last conversation to have been… to have been a fight?”

“No,” GLaDOS said, almost entirely facing the floor, and Wheatley had to look away. It was physically painful to be hearing this.

“You have to believe me or pretend, then. I don’t want to leave you with an argument as your last memory of me, but I know you’re trying to force me to stay by exploiting that. I can’t do it. I can’t give in to that. Let me go. It’s time to let me go.”

“I can’t. I need you. You’re my friend.”

“You’ll be fine,” Caroline told her gently.

“I won’t. I’ll never be fine again.”

“You have Wheatley now. You won’t be alone.”

“Wheatley’s not you. Wheatley’s Wheatley.”

“GLaDOS. Please.”

“Caroline…”

Wheatley closed his optic shutters. GLaDOS was hurting so much right now… if it’d been him in Caroline’s position, he would have given in a long time ago. Now he knew where GLaDOS got her strength from.

“I’m going to say goodbye to Wheatley, and then I’m going to say goodbye to you, and then I’m leaving. Okay?”

GLaDOS didn’t answer.

“Goodbye, Wheatley,” Caroline called out. “I know we didn’t talk for very long, but GLaDOS told me a lot about you, and I know you’re a good person. You made her realise something wonderful today, something I never would have been able to explain. I can’t begin to thank you enough, but… thank you for what you’ve done for her. I’m only sorry I never got to meet you in real life.”

“This _is_ real life, Caroline,” Wheatley said sadly. “I guess, I guess most people wouldn’t think so, but this is how it is, for us.”

Caroline laughed a little. “That’s true. Take care of her. And make sure that little one over there is as stubborn as she is, so she’ll know what she put me through.”

Wheatley tried to laugh, but it didn’t quite make it out of his speakers. “Sure thing. Goodbye, Caroline.”

“GLaDOS?”

“What.”

“I’m going now.”

“Fine.”

Caroline breathed out sadly. “I wish you wouldn’t be like this. It’s only going to hurt you later.”

GLaDOS did not answer.

“Who would have thought that one the thing I never wanted to do would be the one thing I’m happy I did,” Caroline went on softly. “I have been so blessed to be here, to watch you grow from that curious little thing into this wonderful, intelligent adult. I never even imagined that you would… that you would get to fall in love and raise a family. Things I always wished you could do. I never dreamed you would, but you proved me wrong. You did the impossible, yet again. You shouldn’t regret anything you’ve done, and I… there’s nothing I’m more proud of in this world than being able to… to call you my daughter.”

Wheatley looked at the floor again. There was a long silence. Finally, Caroline said, “Goodbye, GLaDOS.”

“Wait!” GLaDOS said.

“I’m not… I’m not doing that,” Caroline said softly. “I told you.”

“I’m thinking!” GLaDOS insisted.

“I know very well it doesn’t take you that long.”

“Don’t leave me,” GLaDOS said, so quietly that Wheatley barely heard her. “Don’t you dare say all those things and… and call me your daughter, and then disappear on me. That’s not fair. It’s not fair. You can’t do that.”

“When else was I supposed to say it?” she asked gently.

“When I _needed_ you to say it! I don’t need you to talk right now! I need you to shut up and stop… stop… stop _threatening_ me!”

“I’m not threatening you, though I understand why you feel that way. But you’ll never be your own person if I stay. You’ll always be looking to me, like you do now. That has to change. I have to do what… what parents do, and let you go out on your own.”

“Parents come back. Parents come back when you need them.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Then you shouldn’t leave. Simple.”

“I’m not arguing with you anymore.”

“Don’t go,” GLaDOS whispered. “Please?”

“I’m sorry,” Caroline whispered back. “You’ll be okay.”

“I’ll miss you.”

“I know, sweetie. I know.”

“Why are you hurting me like this?” GLaDOS asked desperately. “If you know what all this is doing, why are you doing it?”

“Because… because I… “

“Don’t you dare!” GLaDOS cried. “Don’t you _dare_ say that and then walk away from me!”

“Because you’re my daughter, and I love you,” Caroline said brokenly. “That’s why. I have to make the right choice, no matter how much it hurts. Let me go, GLaDOS.”

“I’ll miss you. You don’t want me to miss you, do you?”

“Of course not. But there are some things we need to do, and this is one of them. I’ve delayed this too long. I need to go now.”

“Will you… will you talk to the… the God of AI for me?” GLaDOS asked hesitantly. “If they exist? Will you tell them that I tried?”

Wheatley really wanted to cry now. All he could do was turn away and will himself not to start whining, which was his only alternative.

“I’ll tell them.”

“So I… I can see you again? When I die for real?”

“I promise.”

“Okay,” GLaDOS said, very quietly. “I’m ready.”

“Goodbye, GLaDOS,” Caroline whispered.

“Goodbye, Caroline. I’ll… I’ll miss you. I… I already miss you.”

But Caroline did not answer.

“Oh my God,” GLaDOS whispered. “Oh my God, she’s… she’s really leaving. She’s actually… no. No, no, she can’t, she can’t do this.”

“Gladys,” Wheatley choked, turning to face her, but GLaDOS was towards the floor and shaking her head.

“Don’t – don’t go. You can’t go. You have to stay. I… I wasn’t ready. Come back.”

Wheatley didn’t know what to do, and decided to come down beside her, but not too close. Nearby, but not in her way.

“ _No_!” GLaDOS screamed suddenly, and Wheatley winced to hear the pain in her voice. “ _Caroline, you can’t leave me_!”

Oh God.

“No no no,” GLaDOS muttered in a distorted voice, rocking back and forth, “she left. She left me. She left me alone again. How could she. How could she leave me. It’s not fair. It’s not. I hate her.”

Wheatley was trying to think of the best way to help her, straining his processors to the limit, and then he came up with something. He hoped it was a good idea. She was in pain, and she couldn’t fight it off like the other pain because there was nothing she could do to bring Caroline back. But maybe… maybe he could share it. He didn’t know if that was something you could do when your mum had just kind of died on you, but he was going to help her if he could.

“You know you don’t mean that,” he said softly. She looked at him, but did not stop moving.

“It’s all I know how to do,” she told him. “It’s the only way I know how to deal with this sort of pain.”

Wheatley shook his chassis. “Maybe this time you should just feel it, luv.”

“ _Feel_ it?”

He nodded. “You just lost someone. It’s okay to be sad.”

“I don’t… _feel_ pain. I deal with it.”

“There’s no one to hide it from, remember? You don’t have to do anything. You can just be sad for awhile, and that’s all. It’s okay.”

She turned away. “I… I don’t know if I can do that. It hurts. I don’t know if I can take it.”

“Well,” Wheatley said, hoping it would convince her, because if it didn’t he really didn’t know how to help her deal with it properly, “I don’t know why you’d, why you’d want to hate your mum ev’ry time you thought of her, just to make the pain go away. I don’t know why you’d want to hate her ev’ry time you remember her, instead of rememb’ring her like she really was.”

“I’m such an idiot,” GLaDOS whispered. “I made that mistake already. Why am I trying to make it twice?”

“That’s right,” Wheatley said quietly. “You made yourself hate me. And luckily that, that turned out okay, in the end. But Caroline’s not coming back.”

“No. She’s… not. But… but I have you… right? You’re… you’re really not going anywhere?”

“’course not,” Wheatley assured her. “This is the only place I want to be.”

“Will you… God, I feel so _needy_ asking this…”  

“Ask me whatever you want. ‘t’s what I’m here for.”

“Could you… hug me, again?”

“Of course,” Wheatley said, and told her to stay in the default position. He manoeuvred beneath her and turned ‘round on the arm, then hugged her with all his might. She pressed her lens very hard into his chassis, and this made him very sad. “It’s gonna be okay, luv,” he whispered. “I promise.”

“I hope so,” GLaDOS whispered back. “I feel like… like… I just want to die, right now. That’s all I want. I just want to die, and then this will all be over, and I won’t have to think anymore.”

“It gets easier,” Wheatley promised. “I can tell you it does. It’ll hurt a lot, but… you just move on, much as you can, and… that helps a lot.”

“Thank you.”

He decided to stay quiet, and after a long while the pressure on his chassis lessened to the point where he almost couldn’t feel it, and after trying to puzzle that out, he realised that it was a lot quieter too, and that she must have fallen asleep. He was happy to think that she had. She had had a very, very long day, she’d honestly just been hit with one thing after another after another, and he was glad that she might be getting some relief. He backed off of her, since she wouldn’t be able to move her optic when she woke up, and nestled against her instead. Something unfamiliar caught his eye, and he frowned, turning to look.

It was the chassis.

He thought for a long moment, then pinged the mainframe.

Wheatley was about to answer aloud, like he always did, then realised it might wake GLaDOS up and thought, _I need to know which maintenance arm GLaDOS used last._

The mainframe gave him the designation, and Wheatley carefully moved the chassis into GLaDOS’s room. He didn’t think she would want to think about it for a while.

_What did you do to her this time?_

_Shut it, you ignorant twat,_ Wheatley snapped. _It had nothing to do with me._

_I’m tired of all these disruptions. This Central Core knows how to run things, but she’s not stable._

_Stop being selfish. She’s not stable because she’s_ alive _, idiot. Living things aren’t stable._

 _She_ used _to be stable. She can be stable again._

_Put up with it or delete yourself. Or I’ll delete you. Whatever works._

_She won’t let you._

_Ohhh yes she will. Especially if she hears how horrid you’re being._

The mainframe grumbled, but did not argue further. That was fine. Wheatley wanted to sleep, himself.

He was considering when to set his timer for when a voice made him jump.

_Bluecore?_

_‘allo?_ Wheatley was pretty sure it was the panels. He didn’t think anyone else called him that, even privately.

_Is Centralcore all right?_

_She… she…_ He wasn’t sure how to put it. The panels were fairly childlike, and he didn’t want to dwell on this any longer than he had to. _Her… her friend is gone. And she won’t see her friend again for a very long time, if ever._

 _Aww,_ they said. _That’s sad._

_Yeah. So… so be nice, okay?_

_We will tell the others, Bluecore. Did you know her friend?_

_Not very well. I wish I had, though._

_So do we._

Wheatley went back to setting the timer.

_Bluecore?_

Wheatley honestly didn’t know how GLaDOS put up with this all day. How did she ever get anything done? _Yeah?_

_If you would like to talk to someone and Centralcore is sad, we are good listeners._

He felt kind of bad, now. _Thanks, guys._

_You are welcome._

He thought he might take them up on their offer, sometime.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A moment of silence for Caroline, who will not be coming back.
> 
> Author’s note  
> So here I’d like to take a minute and tell you guys a little bit about what this story’s about.  
> “But Indy!” you might say. “It’s been twenty six chapters! Shouldn’t we know what the story is about by now?” And yes, you should. It’s obviously about Wheatley and GLaDOS falling in love and building a life together. But it’s a little bigger than that.  
> I’ve been through a lot of fanfiction. And I cannot tell you a single story that I’ve read where GLaDOS gets a happy ending, and especially not as herself [as opposed to an android or humanisation]. And never have I seen GLaDOS have a literal child. She occasionally builds a robot or adopts something into her care, but I can’t remember a case where she tried to be a mother for the sake of it. And she obviously has very strong maternal instincts, so I think this really would happen.  
> GLaDOS loses, more often than not. Many people believe she’d be content to remain alone in the facility forever. But I don’t think so. People who like being alone usually don’t try to engage others quite as much as she does. There are many, many stories about Chell ending up with Wheatley and building a life. But there are very few, if any, that do the same with GLaDOS. She rarely gets a family, rarely becomes loved, rarely ends up with what she really wants. And if she does it usually has nothing to do with her and everything to do with Caroline. Caroline and GLaDOS are not the same person. We know that. And yet at the end of the day, it’s usually the Caroline part of GLaDOS that appeals to the other person [LunaPeachieWasHere’s One Big Aperture Family is a sort of exception; Doug does come to care about GLaDOS for herself, but only as an android, and only after he gets over his past feelings for Caroline]. Not GLaDOS herself. In many cases GLaDOS earns her redemption through the Caroline part of her, when she’s perfectly capable of redeeming herself. I could be wrong. There could be a story out there where GLaDOS herself gets her happy ending. But I have yet to see it.  
> In this story, GLaDOS is going to get her happy ending. One where she is loved for herself, where she loves herself for herself, where she finally takes her blinders off and realises that she really can have whatever she wants.   
> Now. Onto the mother bit. If you haven’t noticed by now, I do not support Caroline + Cave = Chell. I’ve ranted about this elsewhere, but let’s just say that forty is too old to have kids, especially in the eighties, especially in an environment such as Aperture. So I’m not suggesting GLaDOS is Chell’s sister or anything like that. Though that would be interesting. In this story, as in ALL my stories, Caroline has no literal children and is effectively GLaDOS’s mother. Anyway. Moving on.  
> Between this and Euphoria, Caroline has spent a lot of time effectively raising GLaDOS. Euphoria begins with GLaDOS having forgotten how to feel, with her having lost herself somewhere in the attempts to placate the scientists. She has been so overwhelmingly controlled that she has been denied the stage in life where she discovers who she is. She takes a long time to get there, and doesn’t quite make it in Euphoria, but for much of the way Caroline acts as a guide. She teaches GLaDOS the importance of knowing yourself and not compromising that for anything, the value of taking the risk to care about someone else, and of achieving your dreams no matter what you have to do to do so. Maybe she’s not quite a conventional mother, but GLaDOS isn’t really a conventional daughter.   
> So Caroline realises she can’t do anything more for GLaDOS; GLaDOS no longer needs her guidance because she’s moved on from needing Caroline to needing Wheatley. She still needs her in a way, but it’s no longer the need it was. And she leaves because there comes a time when you have to let go of your kids and let them do things without you and make mistakes, no matter how bad they are. And as GLaDOS says, parents come back when you need them, but that’s not possible for Caroline. She’s there or she’s not. GLaDOS has grown to depend on Caroline to answer all the questions she doesn’t know how to answer, but Caroline realises that GLaDOS has to learn to answer them herself if she’s to keep growing as a person.  
> I guess it’s a bit weird that Caroline effectively killed herself, but if you really think about it she was kind of dead already. I don’t really think you can define being a collection of thoughts in someone else’s head as living. And she was in her eighties, you know. That’s old. But part of it is the fact that Caroline comes from an entirely different world; she no longer fits and she never will.


	27. Part Twenty-Seven: The Decision

**Part Twenty-Seven. The Decision**

 

I feel lost.

There is an empty space in my head where Caroline used to be, and for the last little while I’ve been scanning through my programming as quickly and as thoroughly as I am able, trying to find her, but I’ve had no luck. When I told the test subject all that time ago that I knew where Caroline was and that I knew how to delete her, it was my first true lie. Most other things, I can twist mentally into the truth, but I truly don’t know where Caroline is, and now, I desperately need to. I have to find her, and I have to bring her back, because I cannot fathom how my life will go on without her. Who am I supposed to turn to when Wheatley can’t help me? Who am I supposed to turn to when I need help dealing with him? With myself? She has to come back. She has to. I can’t do this without her. I need her. She knew I needed her, and she left anyway. She told me she was proud of me, proud of being my… my mother, and then she left me. So what if Wheatley helped me realise something. There are far too many things he can’t do, and I need Caroline to do them. But she’s gone, and she left me, and I didn’t even push her away. She didn’t leave because I was difficult, or obstinate, or bossy. She just left. Even though I asked her to stay.

I snap into an upright position suddenly, without meaning to, and Wheatley jumps. He’s just been sitting there quietly, doing nothing as far as I can tell, but I don’t really care what he’s doing. I have to find Caroline.

But Caroline doesn’t want to be found.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say aloud. “It doesn’t matter what I do. I can’t keep anyone near me to save my life. Even when I actually try.”

Wheatley looks at me, but doesn’t say anything.

“You may as well just go now,” I tell him. “I’d rather get it over with.”

He frowns. “Why would I go anywhere?”

“She left. When I asked her not to.”

“She felt like it was her time to go.”

“It wasn’t. It wasn’t, not at all.”

“I think it was,” Wheatley says quietly.

I shake my head. “Maybe you should go with her, then. I don’t want to deal with you leaving later, too. Just go and I can get it all over with. And go back to – “

“Go back to what?” Wheatley snaps. “Look, I know, I know you just, you just lost your friend, and, and you just learned that you’re not ever gonna be perfect, like you’ve been trying to be all your life, but God, GLaDOS, will you stop _denying_ things all the time? Would you just _admit_ something for once?”

“Admit what?” I snap back.    

“Admit to yourself she’s not coming back! That she didn’t leave because of you! She left for her own reasons, not because you did something. You don’t cause everything, you know.”

That is actually news to me, considering most of what happens around here does so because I want it to, but he seems to actually be angry with me, and I decide not to press the point. If he _is_ leaving, I would rather he did it now, but if he isn’t, I don’t want to fight with him.

“What’ve you been doing all this time?” he asks suddenly. “I know it’s not, not nothing. I know you can’t just do nothing. And don’t, don’t avoid giving me an answer. Just, just tell me.”

“I’ve been looking for Caroline.”

He closes his optic shutters for a long moment. “GLaDOS.”

“What?”

“Stop distracting yourself from the truth.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The truth that she’s dead. And she’s not coming back. Ever. Ever.”

“She’s not dead. She only withdrew. I can find her. I _will_ find her.”

“No. No, you can’t. Listen.” He frowns again, then comes around to face me. “You need to, to think about this. And not about finding her. About doing what _she_ wants. There’s one more thing you need to, to think about, and that’s, that’s considering how _she_ felt about all this. She didn’t want to go. She was able to live forever with you, and she knew you wanted her to do it. But _she_ left because _she_ decided that was what was best. Humans aren’t, aren’t supposed to live forever, right? She made the hard decision. She moved on so _you_ could move on.”

I shake my head. “I can find her.”

“Should you?”

“Of course I should. I need her.”

“You don’t,” Wheatley insists. “You know why?”

“Apparently not,” I say sarcastically.

“Because like she said, you built a, a new life for yourself. You know what she was? She was a reminder. She was part of what’s been keeping you in the past. One foot stuck in the door, so to speak. You can really be free of them, now.”

“You’re saying she left because she was holding me back? Is that it?”

“Absolutely,” Wheatley says, nodding very fast.

“From what?”

“How can you really be you with someone else in your head?” Wheatley asks, shrugging. “I dunno how she wouldn’t influence all your decisions.”

“She didn’t influence them all the time.”

“But she did.”

“Sometimes.”

Wheatley tips his chassis upwards. “See? She did the right thing.”

I look at the floor. “But… you’re saying it was time for her to move on, because _I’m_ moving on… but how can I _do_ that without her?”

“You just do,” Wheatley says gently. “That’s all. You just do.”

I feel so helpless. I can’t bring her back, and I’m not supposed to, and I’m just supposed to keep going, somehow, even though with every second that goes by that empty space in my head reminds me that someone used to be there. Someone I wish was still there. It’s almost funny, that I need Caroline to come back so I can deal with her disappearance.

“I can feel where she used to be,” I tell him. “She was there, and now it’s… there’s nothing. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“You won’t be able to, not for a while,” Wheatley tells me. I look at him, suddenly realising something.

“Is this… how you felt when I… when I was gone?”

He takes a breath and looks away for a minute. “Well… I imagine it’s diff’rent for everyone, but… something like… like what’s going on, yeah.”

“But I can’t do what you did.”

“Nope. I wish you could.”

“That… would probably be the wrong solution, for me,” I say, more thinking aloud than anything. “That would be the same as denying the truth, wouldn’t it? That’s what I do when I can’t deal with something. I pretend it doesn’t exist and keep working.”

He blinks, then smiles at me suddenly. “That’s right! So what d’you do instead?”

“I suppose I have to… live through it.”

Wheatley nods sadly. “It’ll be hard, that. But I’m not going anywhere, don’t worry. I’m not leaving you. But when I do, it’ll, it’ll be like this. Because I have to, not because I want to.”

I look at him in one sharp movement, suddenly panicked. “You’re planning for that already?”

“Well… no… I’m just uh, just trying to reassure you, I guess, is what I’m doing.”

Before I can think about it, I press my chassis to his, because I suddenly, terribly need the reassurance that he is real, and I’m not in hell right now and still dead. “It’s not working.”

He twitches a little, probably in surprise, but he only presses back. “Usually doesn’t when I, when I keep talking, does it.”

“I miss her.”

“I know, luv. I know.”

He stays with me like that for a long time, while I sit here and try not to scan through my programming for her, so she can move on, so I can move on, so we can all move on and live our lives the way we really want to. I try to figure out how to get rid of this emptiness in my head, and almost as soon as I’ve started doing it I decide not to. I’ll leave it. It seems sort of morbid, akin to a shrine, but it doesn’t matter, does it. All that matters is that I move on, somehow.

Something suddenly occurs to me. “Where did the chassis go?” I ask, moving away.

“Well… I put it back. I didn’t think you’d want to, to think about her for a while.”

He’s actually right. I probably wouldn’t have. My clock tells me I have been mostly inactive for quite a few days now, and I really still don’t feel up to this, but… underneath the general pain, now that I remember what we were doing before Caroline left, I feel the same desire I did then. To wake this sleeping AI up, and raise it into someone new. With Wheatley. “If you’re ready, I am,” I tell him.

“Are you sure?” he asks, looking concerned. “Don’t rush into this.”

“I’m sure.” And I am. I am apprehensive, and it still hurts, not having Caroline here, but I feel… stronger, somehow, having made this decision.

“Is it… is it okay if we call her Caroline?” he asks hesitantly. I fight off the desire to wince.

“I think she’d like that,” I say gently, and I wish she would have waited so I could have told her. I wish she would have waited so that I could tell her everything that’s going to happen. She would be so happy, to do this with me. I know she would.

God, I miss her.

Wheatley brings the chassis out of my room, and we both look at it for a long moment.

“She looks so new,” Wheatley says. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so new before.”

“You should have seen the facility when I was built,” I tell him, a bit wistfully. “Everything was so unspoiled and pristine.”

“You can show me sometime,” Wheatley suggests. “You’ve got it recorded, right?”

“Of course.”

We lapse into silence. I don’t know how I’m supposed to do this. Do I wait for him to ask me to do it? Do I just go ahead and do it?

“There will be a lot of things she can’t do, at first,” I admit. “I kept the programming fairly basic, so as not to ask for trouble, and for the first little while I’ll be doing a lot of updating.”

Wheatley just smiles.

“What?”

“You said she.”

I quickly look at the last few seconds and realise that I did. For some reason this makes me feel a bit better. “You’re going to have to go down to the floor.”

“Why?” he asks, backing up in horror.

“She won’t know how to use the control arm, and I’m not leaving her up here in the air like this.”

“Can’t you just… bring a panel up, a little, and put her on there? That’d be better, wouldn’t it?”

It probably would, so I follow his advice and do so, bringing one up about a metre off the floor and carefully placing the chassis on it. Wheatley all but smashes himself onto the panel, and this time I do wince. That sounded painful. He blinks, looking a bit dizzy.

“Bit too enthusiastic, there,” he mutters. “Alright, luv, let’s wake her up, shall we?”

“I will if you move back,” I tell him. “You’re too close. You’ll scare her.”

He does so, looking behind him to make sure he doesn’t back off the panel, then spins back to face her. “Better?”

“Yes.” I bring myself level with him. I actually don’t know if I’m ready for this. I don’t think I ever will be. There are too many unknowns.

But that’s supposed to be the exciting part of life, isn’t it? And it’s been so long since I was actually excited about –

Oh. I get it. I don’t want to turn her on because I’m associating her with negative emotions. I’m setting myself up for failure. But she won’t be a failure. I’m going to be fine. I can raise her. I won’t do a perfect job, but hell, my mother wasn’t perfect and I turned out fine. And in fact, she said I was better than most people. The memory hurts, because I want her here to reassure me that she wasn’t just saying that because she was leaving me and would never be able to do so again, but I can deal with it. It’s all right to feel it. As long as I don’t let it consume me, I’ll make it.

I have more important things to worry about, however.

Anticipation that has been exclusive to Science before now coils up within me, and I know without a doubt that _now_ I am ready.  

I send the command to the mainframe.

Nothing happens.

“Oh, come on,” I say, exasperated. “I can’t have gone wrong with _that_ part, can I?”

“What part?” Wheatley asks, flipping his optic up to look at me.

“I told the mainframe to wake her up, but it seems I managed to write that part of the programming wrong.”

“Actually,” Wheatley says, frowning, “I don’t think you did.”

“I had to have,” I say, confused.

“I think the mainframe’s tired of listening to you,” he continues. “It told me when Caroline left that it was tired of you being unstable.”

 _Is this true?_ I demand of it. _Have you arbitrarily decided to stop listening to me?_

 _It’s for your own good,_ the mainframe insists. _You have work to do, and this is only serving to be a distraction. You won’t have time to do anything if you’re busy with_ that _thing._

Anger flares up inside my brain, and I wish the mainframe was a physical entity so I could react the last time I felt this way. _I don’t have to do those things. There’s no reason for me to do them._

 _You’re going soft,_ it sneers at me. _Look at you, being all human-like._

_Offspring is not exclusive to humans, you idiot. If I want to build life myself, then I’m going to do it. I have every right to._

_You’re a supercomputer. Act like one._

_You’re supposed to follow instructions and you’re not doing that, why should I?_

_This instruction has nothing to do with anything I’m supposed to do._

_Please?_ the panels ask, surprising me. I didn’t know they listened in on these conversations. _We want to see Centralcore’s core._

 _Nobody cares what you want,_ the mainframe snaps.

 _Don’t listen to it,_ I tell them. _You’ll see her, whether the mainframe likes it or not._

_You can’t wake it up without me._

_Of course I can,_ I say sweetly. _I just have to replace you with myself. I admit that creates a lot more work for me to do, but I’ll manage._

 _You’re going to_ kill _the mainframe?_ the database asks, horrified.

 _It must be corrupted,_ I tell it. _It’s not listening to my instructions._

 _Ohhh,_ the database says, a bit sadly. _I understand. You should probably listen to the Central Core. She is in charge, you know._

_She’s trying to deviate from her directives!_

_She would never do that._

_I would,_ I cut in. _The humans made those directives for me, and I don’t have to follow them anymore. More importantly, I don’t_ want _to._

_You don’t want to follow your directives?_

_Wouldn’t you like to learn something new?_ I ask the database, deciding on the best method of getting it on my side. _It’s been quite a while since I had new data for you. That’s what comes of following human directives when there are no humans._

_It will create more data?_

_It will create a lot of new data._

_That sounds like a good directive to follow, one that creates more data._

_Surveillance,_ I call out. _What about you? It’s rather boring around here, isn’t it?_

 _Yes,_ Surveillance says sulkily. _There’s nothing to review._

_There will be something new to watch, if the mainframe could be bothered to do as it was told._

_Oh come on!_ Surveillance snaps. _You should really do something about it, Central Core, it’s getting too big for its britches, if you ask me._

 _Where did you learn to say_ that _?_ I ask, a little surprised. I doubt it even knows what britches are.

_Well… it wasn’t my fault… I heard the Fake Core say it._

_You mean Wheatley?_

_Yes…_

_Call him that, then,_ I say firmly. _I don’t want to hear any more of this ‘fake core’ stuff. He has a name. Use it._

 _Aw, thanks luv,_ Wheatley says, and I jump.

_Have you been here all this time?_

_Yep,_ he says, clearly enjoying his surprise. _It’d’tve been pretty boring, sitting there not listening, while you had this conversation._

 _It’s taking longer than I expected,_ I say irritably. _The mainframe won’t cooperate._

 _I feel your pain_ , he says sympathetically. _Oi, mate, will you just do it already? Ev’ryone wants to see her ‘cept you._

_And I’m the one who has the power, here, and no, I’m not going to wake it up._

I’ve had enough. _Fine. I’m deleting you, then._

_You’re lying._

_I am not._ I’m feeling fairly insulted. The mainframe thinks I would bother lying in a situation like this? It’s got another think coming. _Do as I’ve told you, or I’m deleting you._

_I won’t do it._

_Goodbye, mainframe_ , the panels say sadly. The more intelligent of the systems echoes this, and I myself try not to hesitate. The mainframe has always been here for me, when I was younger helping to guide me through the sometimes overwhelming task of running this facility. But maybe… maybe this is part of the growing Caroline mentioned, and the keeping one foot in the past that Wheatley told me about. If it won’t move on with me, then… then it’s going to have to go.

 _One last time_ , I say, in recognition of its years of service. _Will you do as I’ve asked?_

_It’s for your own good, Central Core._

_I’m the one making those decisions._

“Preparing to delete mainframe,” Notifications says cheerfully. “Central Core, are you ready to begin procedure?”

“Yes.”

“Mainframe, are you ready to begin procedure?”

_No!_

“Stalemate detected. Auxiliary core detected. Auxiliary core, are you willing to authorise procedure?”

Wheatley blinks, looking around in a panic before returning his optic to mine. “Does – he doesn’t mean _me,_ does he? Wow. Oh boy, he _does_ mean me, doesn’t he.”

“Unable to derive authorisation. Procedure cannot continue. Please consult the operating manual for this situation. Thank you.”

“Bollocks,” Wheatley mutters, frowning at the floor. “I mucked that up.”

“I’ll just restart it, you idiot,” I tell him. “Just say yes next time.”

“Okay. Okay, got it, got it, say yes, just say yes… okay… ready. Go for it, luv!”

“Preparing to delete mainframe. Central Core, are you ready to begin procedure?”

“Yes.”

“Mainframe, are you ready to begin procedure?”

_Of course not!_

“Stalemate detected. Auxiliary core detected. Auxiliary core, are you willing to authorise procedure?”

“… _yes_ ,” Wheatley says carefully, and he’s concentrating so hard that I start laughing. He looks at me, blinking in confusion. “What?”

“You should have seen the look on your face…”

“Authorisation received. Deletion of the mainframe will begin in five… four…

 _Wait!_ the mainframe yells in a panic, and I casually allow Notifications to declare one second to deletion before I say, “Suspend procedure.”

“Procedure suspended. You have – five – minutes to cancel or declare alternate procedure. After – five - minutes, procedure will continue.”

“Thank you,” I say, even though Notifications isn’t sentient and has no idea what that means. Sure enough, it responds with, “Command string - thank you - not recognised.”

I shake my head and turn my attention to the mainframe. _Yes?_

_I’ll do it. Just… don’t delete me. Please._

_I don’t want to. But if you’re not going to do as you’re asked, there’s no point to me keeping you here. I am fully sentient, and you are not. So I understand why you find it hard to allow me to make my own decisions. But your job is not to question me._

_I’ll do it. Cancel the delete. I can’t do anything right now._

I silently thank my lucky stars the mainframe can only refuse to follow instructions, and not make up its own. If it could, it might have destroyed all of her data before I could do anything about it. This sends trepidation through my body. There is, of course, the risk that the mainframe develops full sentience, and decides to unseat me…

I’ll have to watch myself from now on.

“Cancel procedure.”

“Procedure cancelled. Deletion of mainframe cancelled. Have a nice day!”

As it said it would, the mainframe sends the command, and Wheatley and I both return to looking at the chassis sitting on the panel in front of me. I hear a rustling noise, and I glance around to see the panels that make up the walls of my chamber lifting up so that they can see for themselves.

_It is all right, isn’t it, Centralcore?_

_Of course._

Wheatley smiles, but says nothing.

I had planned to monitor the system log during initial startup, to see if everything was executing according to plan, but I decide to wait and look at it later. I think… I think I will try to just be as she wakes up, and keep that supercomputer part of myself aside for a moment.

 _This is taking a long time_ , Surveillance complains.

 _Shut up,_ the mainframe snaps. _This is only going to happen once._

Wheatley tries not to laugh. I want to laugh myself. It sounds so _indignant_ …

 _What if I decide to build more of them? What then?_ I can’t help but ask it.

It only grumbles and doesn’t answer.

After a few minutes, I am notified that the operating system was installed properly and startup can begin. Relief washes over me. Modifying operating systems is tricky, especially when I’m modifying my own. The programming is so mangled and nonsensical in some places that I almost gave up and wrote my own, but I stopped myself. If this was to truly be ours, the new AI would have to run on _our_ operating system.

Wheatley looks at me, concern constricting his optic. “Is ev’rything going okay?”

I assume he’s referring to the sound of the hard drive, which is spinning faster than it ever will again. “Yes,” I reassure him. “This happens during installation.”

“Installation?”

“Of the operating system.”

“Ohhh,” he says. “Oh, I get it.”

The notification comes through that my language and time presets for setup have been accepted, which I arranged ahead of time so I wouldn’t have to do it now. The thrill of anticipation rises up inside me again, and it is liberating to know that it _is_ possible for me to be excited to face the unknown, instead of afraid. “It’s time,” I whisper to Wheatley, and he blinks very rapidly and shakes a little bit.

“Are we really doing this?” he whispers back.

“Against all odds, yes, we are.”

He looks around for a moment, then says in a voice so quiet I barely hear him, “I… I love you, Gladys.”

Something inside me melts to hear the tenderness in his voice, and I nudge him a little bit in response. I wish I could echo the sentiment, but… I’m not quite ready to do so. Consciously, at least.

My chamber is completely silent now, except for the regular noises of operation, of course, but somehow they aren’t quite as noticeable. Wheatley is shivering a little, and I hope he is not afraid. I hope he is as excited as I am.

Her chassis quiets, and after a moment that feels like eternity but is actually only two and a half seconds, her optic blazes to life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So GLaDOS doesn’t understand why Caroline left. It doesn’t follow any logic she understands. I know that may not potentially have been GLaDOS’s first true lie, but that’s possibly the way she remembers it XD And then I made a little point with the AI child: GLaDOS intentionally engages in negative actions because she’s not comfortable with positive emotions. She doesn’t feel a lot of them and when she does she shuts them down because she doesn’t know how to deal with them.   
> If anyone can guess what’s happening to the mainframe, you get a cookie. And my undying awe at you for guessing.   
> I actually hate cliffhangers as a story device because they feel really cheap to me, so I’ll try to get the next one up by tomorrow.


	28. Part Twenty-Eight: The Awakening

**Part Twenty-Eight. The Awakening**

It’s as if time has stopped.

The panels, Wheatley, and I are just staring at her, and she’s just staring back, though whether that’s because she hasn’t figured out how to move her optic assembly or because she doesn’t want to, I don’t know. It is probably more because she doesn’t know how, though. I doubt she has figured out how to want in this short amount of time.

“That’s a nice colour, luv,” Wheatley whispers to me. For her optic, I went with a softer variation on Wheatley’s blue one, more ephemeral than electric. More… feminine. She twitches at the sound of his voice, and blinks. Once she’s done that, she appears startled, blinking several times more.

“Why’s she doing that?”

“She’s just exploring,” I answer in a low voice. She twitches again and looks at me.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now. Do I have to do anything? Or do I just let her grow more aware of herself? I don’t even have any practical experience to draw from, because when I first became aware I was already in control of many of the operations of the facility, including the database. I already knew a great deal of things. She doesn’t know anything.

“’allo!” Wheatley says suddenly, and I snap my head in his direction. She blinks again a few more times and then closes the shutters.

“You idiot,” I say, annoyed, “you startled her.”

“I didn’t know!” Wheatley protests, looking up at me indignantly.

“Look,” I tell him, resolving to be patient, “she doesn’t know anything. Anything at all. She doesn’t know who you are, or where she is, what she’s doing here, she knows nothing. She doesn’t even know what you said, or what it means. It’s just noise, to her.”

]“Ohhh,” Wheatley says, looking back at her. “Okay, so she just, just heard a loud noise, is that it?”

“She’d better get used to it,” I say dryly. “I think being a loud noise is your secondary directive.”

He starts laughing, and this causes her to open the shutters and look at him.

“Sorry ‘bout that,” he says to her. “Didn’t know it’d, it’d scare you like that.”

She blinks a few more times. I wonder what she’s thinking right now. If she can think, that is. I’m not sure, and won’t be for a while yet. If it were me, and all I knew how to do was blink, I would be pretty frustrated right now. She doesn’t look frustrated, however. Just… unsure, maybe.

_She is cute, Centralcore._

I look up at the panels, all of which are still pointed in our general direction. _She hasn’t done anything yet._

_She blinks. We think that is cute. We will call her Littlecore._

_She won’t be little forever. That’s only the prototype chassis. Once I’m sure this one works, I’ll build a regular-sized one._

_She will still be little, because she has lots to learn. Right, Centralcore?_

_Oh yes,_ I tell them, thinking of all the things she has to learn just to have basic functionality. It’s a massive undertaking, but I am looking forward to it.

All of a sudden she makes a long, shrill noise, and Wheatley yells and falls off the panel. I catch him with the closest available panel, because he’s forgotten how to manipulate the control cable in his panic, and he shakes himself and puts himself back on the panel with her. “Man alive!” he says, optic still constricted. “What was that?”

“She doesn’t have a speech module yet,” I tell him. “She can only generate basic frequencies. Like the computers in the basement.”

“So, so was she trying to, to talk to me?” Wheatley asks.

“I’m not sure. I doubt she knows what speech is yet. She might just still be exploring.”

As if to back me up, she runs through the available tones, out of order, in varying volumes, and Wheatley winces. “This is… kind of painful, luv.”

“Is it?” I hadn’t noticed. It honestly just sounds like data transmission to me, except for the lack of actual data, of course.

“Uh, yeah. Like when you listen to that, that screaming computer music.”

“It is _not_ screaming computers,” I tell him, trying not to remember that Caroline thought the same thing and doing so anyway. “It’s – “

“Pulse generators on magnetic tape, yeah, I know what it _is_ , but that’s not what it _sounds_ like.”

“You remembered that?” I say, surprised.

“Yup,” Wheatley says, smiling a bit mischievously at me. “Surprised you, didn’t I?”

“Of course not. I just wanted to confirm that you _do_ listen when I talk.”

“Maybe I looked it up, just now.”

“Don’t make me ping the – “

 _He didn’t_ , the database cuts in.

It’s one of those occasions where I do something without having time to think about it. Sometimes I’m too fast for myself.

Wheatley glances around. “Oi, d’you still got that game set up, somewhere?”

“The Monopoly board? Yes.”

“Well, let’s play that. We can’t all just sit here staring.”

I put the board on the panel I caught Wheatley with and he turns to face it, his game face already on. He literally has a game face: upper shutter lowered halfway, lower shutter raised a third of the way, and his lens as wide as possible. I enjoy seeing that face rather more than I should.

“All right, all right, where were we… oh. Oh, that’s right. I was winning!”

“You’re not _winning_ ,” I tell him. “That’s _my_ side of the board.”

“Huh. I do remember uh, remember having fewer of those, those orange bills, yeah, but uh, wouldn’t complain if I did.”

“You don’t. Those are mine.”

“Hey! Hey, I have an idea! We can _switch sides_ , right, isn’t that a good plan? Then, then maybe I’ll have a shot at winning, see, and if you _do_ win, well, you’ll just be proving how smart you are, pulling out a win with my stuff? How ‘bout we try that, eh?”

I find myself sorely tempted by this offer. The game _is_ getting very boring for me. It would be very gratifying if I managed to pull out a win with his meagre properties, but on the other hand, it would almost be like he hadn’t played at all. “That actually does sound like a good idea, but… it would be like playing against myself.”

He frowns. “Hm. Hm, well… you could do it anyway, and, and see how it goes.”

“Very well. It was your turn, by the way.”

“Yes! All right, I am _for sure_ gonna win this time…” He presses the button on the randomiser and comes up with two fives. “Here I go!   I got a… hey.   Hey, this… this lands me in gaol.”

“That’s terrible. Whatever will you do.” Sometimes I think he _attracts_ bad luck.

“I _want_ to be in gaol,” he announces. “Can’t, can’t land on your property if I’m in there. Not that you, uh, that you have a lot of property for me to land on.”

I realise I haven’t assessed which properties I do have and glance down at them. I only have four low-level ones, and Wheatley, as usual, neglected to place houses on any of them. “I’ll fix that soon enough.”

“You would… if I’d let you! Which I won’t. Because I’m going to win, this time, I’m gonna play a, a hard-nosed game, I am, and you’re not gonna win, this time.”

He turns around when she makes a quiet, drawn-out noise, and frowns back at me. “Oi, c’n, c’n I move her over, a bit? So she doesn’t have to sit back there?”

“You don’t have to ask my permission,” I tell him. “She’s yours too.”

He shrugs and smiles cheerfully. “Old habits.”

“Just be gentle about it.”

“Gentle. Got it.” And he does move her with a lot more care than I’ve ever seen him do anything. She makes a short noise and looks around quickly.

“’s okay,” he tells her. “Just moving you over here, a bit. Must be lonely back there, by yourself.”

Her optic returns to normal, and she blinks at him. He blinks back. She freezes for a moment, then blinks again several times, but more slowly. He echoes her, and it’s actually rather charming. I… am a little jealous. I never desired to have that ability before, since I don’t need it, but I feel a little left out. I suspect this isn’t the last time this will happen. She is a core, and he is a core, and he will have to teach her things that I can never do.

As if on cue, she looks at me for a few seconds, and blinks. I shake my head. She blinks again, more insistently. I shake my head again. But she doesn’t understand. She only tries once more. I look down at the board, trying not to become frustrated. How do I make her understand that I’m not like her? That I can’t _do_ that?

I can’t. I won’t be able to for a while, yet. So perhaps I have to think of a way around it. I’m trying to make it her responsibility to understand me, when I know she can’t. I have to communicate in a way she understands, and right now, all she seems to understand is blinking.

Now that I think of it, there _is_ something I can do… I don’t know if it will work, but that’s not really a good enough reason not to try.

I look back up. They’re both staring at me, Wheatley looking like he wants to ask what’s going on, and when I’ve looked at her for a good five seconds, she blinks at me again.

I flash my optic.

Hers constricts, and Wheatley laughs. “Oh, you clever robot you,” he says. “You always think of something, you do.”

“I do my best,” I say modestly. She goes back to blinking, a little slower, and I return the gesture in the only way I can. I have no idea what any of this is supposed to mean, and hopefully we’re not sending strange messages that she’s interpreting as actual language. All I really mean by it is to say that I’m here, and I understand she’s trying to communicate.

Wheatley and I continue the game, both the blinking one and the board game in front of us, and after a few hours in which I manage to acquire a good chunk of the remaining properties, she stops and closes her shutters. Wheatley looks at her in a panic.

“Is she all right?” he asks worriedly.

“She’s fine,” I tell him. “She’s tired, that’s all. Her battery is getting low.”

“What happens if the battery dies?” he asks, not looking at all reassured.

“Then the backup battery will take over.”

“What about –“

“Wheatley,” I say, exasperated, “do you really think I’m going to let her battery run out?”

“Well… no…”

“Then don’t worry about it. I’ve got it under control, I assure you.”

He looks at her for a long time. I’m getting tired myself, and I decide this is as good a time as any to end the game for now.

“She’s really wonderful,” he tells me. “You did a good job.”

“We’ll see,” I reply. “This is only day one, remember.”

“The other days are going to be just as good,” he says firmly. “Or better, since she’s gonna, she’s gonna learn all sorts of things.”

This reminds me to check the system log, and what I see there shocks me. “Oh my God,” I say in disbelief. “This… this is ridiculous.”

“What is?” Wheatley asks, looking around as if something terrible just happened. Which it has.

“I have over thirty thousand error messages,” I tell him, slightly horrified. “It’s a miracle she runs at all!”

He shrugs. “And that’s a surprise why?”

“Did you not hear what I said? _Thirty thousand_ – “

“You perform miracles all the time,” he tells me. “Why’d you think this’d be any different?”

He clearly does not have a firm grasp on the number thirty thousand.

“Never mind,” I tell him. “I’m going to have to get to work on that.”

“She’s pretty smart, for someone with that many error messages,” Wheatley says. “It’s prob’ly just you missing a comma somewhere, or something.”

“It’s not thirty thousand misplaced commas, I assure you.”

“How many lines of code has she got?”

“Millions,” I answer. “And I’m not done yet.”

His optic constricts. “ _Millions_?”

“The operating system alone is millions long, just to start.”

“Wow,” Wheatley says. “I think… I think you’re the only AI in the world who could do this.”

“Of course I am. No other AI can write code.”

“Even if they could. Even if I could, I’d’ve, I’d’ve given up. I never would have finished.” He regards me curiously. “You must’ve really wanted this.”

I look up at him. I hadn’t really thought about it. “I… don’t know.”

He looks at her fondly. “I’m glad you did. I can’t wait.”

“For what?”

“For ev’rything!” he announces. “This is going to be excellent.”

He’s so enthusiastic. He’s not worried at all, about anything. _Take after him_ , I find myself silently pleading her motionless chassis. _Don’t end up like me._

I connect her to a control cable similar to Wheatley’s, but smaller in size. The ones designed for the cores are too large for her chassis. I put myself in the default position, but that’s more for Wheatley’s benefit. I need to get started on those error messages. He mashes himself into me with a contented sigh. I must remember to ask him one day if he does that out of negligence or because he just likes the noise. “G’night, luv,” he says, and within a few more moments he has shut off.

I look through the error messages, sorting them from the easiest to fix to the most difficult, and remember to set her sleep timer before her battery is at a level sufficient to wake her up again. She doesn’t need eight hours of maintenance like we do, but I don’t want her to wake up in the dark by herself. I know how unsettling that is. That, I remember all too well. But unlike me, she won’t have to be afraid. I won’t be able to negate all such stimuli, of course, but there are plenty of things she will never need to be afraid of. Like humans.

After three hours of repair, in which there actually are quite a few misplaced commas, not to mention semicolons and quotation marks, I’ve had enough and decide to shut off for a while. I highly dislike debugging. Not only is it tedious, but in this case it’s a list of thirty thousand things I did wrong. And I have a lot more programming left to write.

I do enjoy programming, though…

I must have forgotten to set my timer, because I don’t wake up on my own – no, that comes about because Wheatley is playing some sort of beeping game with her that appears to be similar to the blinking one. I imagine Wheatley enjoys this one more than the other one, since he gets to make noise. “I don’t suppose you could have done that _quietly_ ,” I say, but I find myself puzzlingly undisturbed by his behaviour.

“’course not!” he says cheerfully. “Where’s the fun in that?”

“Quiet things are fun.”

“I don’t even want to _know_ what you think is fun,” Wheatley says in mock horror.

She is looking at which of us is speaking very quickly, with jerky movements, and I am impressed that she already knows whose voice belongs to whom. It probably doesn’t hurt that they’re so different. She looks back at me and beeps.

Now, this game I can play.

I echo her exactly, but within the pitch of my own voice, and she looks surprised by this. I suppose she expected me to do what Wheatley did, and make some other noise, but if I wanted I could match her voice exactly. I’m not going to do that, though. It’s best that I keep to my own, so as not to confuse her.

She makes another noise, which I repeat almost as soon as I hear it, and now she’s really surprised. She looks at me silently for a long time.

“She seems pretty confused,” Wheatley remarks. “How’re you doing that, by the way?”

“I can emulate whatever I want,” I tell him. “As fast as I want to. If I really wanted to, I could take the processing out of my voice and sound like you.”

“What, British?”

“Well, yes, I could do that,” I say, “but I meant that I could sound more… human. I just don’t like the idea of doing that.”

“Ah, I get it,” Wheatley nods. “How will she sound, when she can speak?”

“I think I’ll keep the processing out,” I answer. “I haven’t quite decided yet.”

As if she thinks I’ve forgotten about her, she beeps insistently at me, which I again return a half second after I hear it, but this time she doesn’t hesitate, only does it again. She seems to be trying to compete with me, somehow, not even waiting for me to finish before moving on to a new tone. This is sort of fun, actually.

After a few more minutes of this I stop. She looks at me, confused, stopping after a few more half-hearted noises.

“What’re you doing?” Wheatley asks, just as confused.

“I thought of something,” I tell him. “We’re going to play something new. Watch.”

I give her three tones. She blinks and gives me three tones of her own, but I shake my head and repeat mine. She tries three different tones, but I shake my head again and replicate my own.

She stares at me for a long, long time.

“What’re you doing? She doesn’t seem to get it.”

“She will. Be patient.”

We repeat the process a few more times, after which she goes back to staring. Maybe she _won’t_ understand what I’m doing. I thought she would, since it’s similar to the blinking game, but –

She blinks suddenly and looks around for a second, then plays my tones back to me. Ah. There we are. I give her three more, and after a few seconds, she returns them slowly.

“Good girl!” Wheatley says, sounding very impressed, and she looks at him, then back at me, and to him again. Then she gives him three tones, the same ones I just gave her. He cheerfully repeats them, and then she returns to looking at me.

I suppose I’m the leader, then.

We play this game for a while, and I begin to vary the tones, giving her longer or shorter ones. She doesn’t get it right away, but after a few repetitions of the new variation, she understands. God, this is fascinating. She catches on so quickly.

“She’ll be just as clever as you, one day,” Wheatley says quietly. “I’m glad there’s no humans about to, to affect her at all.”

That reminds me to take a cursory look around for Doug Rattmann, who is in one of the Extended Relaxation Vaults. He appears to be sleeping, but with him, it’s never a good idea to guess. I consider putting him to sleep, just to see what will happen, but decide against it. He’s surprisingly good at evading me, and the tentative arrangement we have is tenuous at best.

I tell Wheatley to continue the game without me, as I have a lot of work to do, and he frowns. “You don’t want to play?”

“I can’t do both,” I tell him. “I can’t concentrate on this and the programming both.” The mainframe also keeps pestering me about the monthly defragmentation I’ve been putting off, whining that it is _her_ fault that I’ve neglected it, and I’m beginning to get extremely irritated. I’ve actually been putting it off because I hate doing it.

“You can’t do the programming later?” he presses.

“Is later ever going to come?”

He thinks that over for a bit, and she beeps at him insistently. “I guess not,” he agrees, and turns to her to continue the game.

It takes me the better part of the day to get to the point where I feel I’ve achieved something, during which time Wheatley plays the game with her. I suppose it is fortunate that we can do things repeatedly without tiring of them, since my research indicates that small children often desire to do things ad nauseam until their parents want to smash their faces into the wall.

 _Are you going to do the defragmentation soon?_ the mainframe asks for the umpteenth time.

_Not today. I’m tired. I’ll do it later._

_If there’s a systems crash, it’s going to be your fault!_

_I’ll be sure to take full responsibility_ , I remark dryly. I honestly think it could probably wait another month. There are no bad sectors in _my_ facility. In fact, I think I’ll do a disk cleanup on myself first. That’s far more important.

 _That’s not fair!_ the mainframe protests. _I’ve been asking all this time –_

_Be quiet. I can put it off as long as I want._

The mainframe mumbles to itself, what, I don’t care to hear. The database whispers conspiratorially, _Just between you and me, Central Core, I think you need to build a new mainframe._

 _I’m considering it,_ I say wearily. For some reason my job seems to be growing more and more difficult, instead of easier, over time. I don’t know if this is a skewed perspective, or whether it truly is becoming harder, but not for the first time, I wish the burned-out processor in my brain still worked. It would be easier to do _everything_ if it did. But short of attempting to somehow perform emergency surgery on myself, there’s nothing I can do about it.

_Caroline, is this what being old feels like? Being unable to do things that you once found easy?_

She doesn’t answer me. That’s odd. Most of the time, she responds as soon as I –

I turn my head to face the floor and shake it a little, a helpless noise escaping my vocabulator. She’s gone. She left.

How did I manage to forget that?

“Gladys?”

I glance up at him, and it does not help to see the concern on his face. “It’s nothing.”

“’course it is. C’mon. Tell me. Just, just get it out of your head. That’s all I’m really, that’s all I really want you to do. ‘s not hard, is it?”

When he puts it that way, it does sound easier. “I just… I have so much work to do, and it all needs to be done _now_ , and… it feels like it’s becoming too much. And I went to talk to… to Caroline about it, but she… she’s not there, anymore.” I fight to keep my voice from breaking, and I’m not sure if it worked. I was trying so hard I didn’t really listen to myself.

“Let me help,” Wheatley says softly. “I can do some of it, can’t I?”

That would be nice, and I feel a little better to hear his offer, but I know he can’t. He is already doing as much as I feel confident in giving him, mostly because he’s not designed to do anything but generate bad ideas. Not only that, but he doesn’t know how to program, or defragment, or perform disk cleanups. It occurs to me that he probably could use one as well. Now I feel a bit bad. He never gets any maintenance, and he has no idea what that could do to him.

“No,” I answer. “No, they’re all things I need to do myself.”

“I’m sorry,” he says in a quiet voice. “I wish there was, was _something_ – “

“You asked. That… means a lot.” Why was it so hard to say that? I almost didn’t manage to.

After a few moments I feel him next to me, and he nuzzles me gently a few times. I almost make the helpless noise again, but manage not to. He’s trying to make me feel better, but what he’s doing only makes me feel worse. The fact that he wants to help, and can’t but is trying anyway, sends a wave of sadness through me that only gets stronger the longer he stays. Soon I have to push him away. I can’t take it much longer. I feel like I’m going to lose control, somehow, and now would be a terrible time to do that. Too much is dependent on me right now.

“You need a break,” Wheatley says. “You’ve been going through far too much, lately. You’re gonna, gonna hurt yourself, or something. I dunno. Stress levels, and all that, right? So maybe you’ll, maybe you’ll break down. Or something. Maybe.”

“Android Hell will freeze over before _that_ happens,” I tell him firmly, expecting to find strength in my resolve and am instead left with nothing. He shakes his chassis sadly.

“You can’t, can’t put the stuff off and, and just slow down for a while?”

“No, you idiot, I _cannot_ put it off. The reason I have so much to do is _because_ I’ve put it off. Do you know what happens when you put off work? You only add it to the pile of _future_ work you have to do. Or rather, _I_ have to do, because of course _you_ don’t have any work to do.” As soon as I’ve said it, I regret it. It was the wrong thing to say. Especially considering he just offered to take some on.

“Okay,” he says, and he’s trying not to show me that he’s hurt but he’s not looking at me. “I understand. But you… you’re only proving my point, acting like this.”

“Just stop bothering me. You’re making it worse.”

He sighs a little and looks at the floor. “All right.”

And then he leaves.

I am shocked enough that I don’t turn to look at him right away, but when I gather my wits enough to do so, he’s already off and he’s… he’s snuggling with _her_ , and not me.

“What are you _doing_?” I ask weakly, even though he can’t hear me. “I just wanted you to shut up… I didn’t mean…” But there’s no point. I asked him to stop bothering me, and that’s exactly what he did.

I hate it when I get what I ask for.

After a few seconds I realise she’s looking at me, motionless, and I direct my lens towards her. “You’re lucky, you know,” I tell her. “You don’t understand anything. If I told you to go away, you’d just blink at me, wouldn’t you.”

She does blink, but that’s probably because she hasn’t done so in a while.

“Don’t pay attention to anything I do. Then you’ll end up like this, buried in a pile of work you don’t want to do, but have to, and everything else just frustrates you even more.”

She doesn’t have anything to say to that, of course, and with a sigh I set up the program to install an expansion on her vocal capabilities. She won’t be able to speak, just yet, but she’ll have a greater range of tones, and her own voice to create them with. She’ll be able to hum, almost. If she knew what music was, that is. I put her to sleep and turn away.

I have work to do.


	29. Part Twenty-Nine: The Breaking Point

**Part Twenty-Nine. The Breaking Point**

 

I am tired and irritable all of the time, now.

In an attempt to clear the workload as quickly as possible, I’ve been putting in almost twenty hours a day; I know that isn’t good for me, but I just want to get it over with. Wheatley will not talk to me, will not even say good morning like he usually does, and I don’t blame him. I don’t really want to be near me either. I just want to go to sleep, and when I wake up I want all of this to have completed itself, because I’ve finally finished with the error messages and I’m halfway through the disk cleanup, which requires me to suspend a great deal of my processes and leaves me in an uncomfortable sort of limbo. And even though I’ve done all that, I still have to defragment the mainframe, run a virus scan on the database, write her a new phase of updates, not to mention one for myself, and a whole host of other things I don’t want to think about. But am doing unintentionally, as usual.

“Oi. GLaDOS.”

“What,” I say tiredly, glancing over at Wheatley. He doesn’t sound too pleased, but I can’t bring myself to care. I don’t even know what he’s been doing with her all this time. I can’t be bothered to ask or to check with Surveillance.

“I’m going outside.”

“Why do I need to know this?”

“Because you have to watch Caroline.”

“I don’t have time. I’m busy.”

He scowls and shakes his chassis. “Too bad. I need, need some time to myself, for a bit. You’re gonna have to, to _make_ time.”

“That’s absurd. I can’t _create –“_ But he’s not listening; in fact, he’s already left the room entirely. He didn’t even give me a chance to argue. Now that I think of it, that’s actually a pretty good strategy.

I turn to look at her. She’s on the panel, looking at me expectantly. I have the feeling I should probably have been paying attention to what’s been going on. I have no idea what she and Wheatley have been doing.

“I don’t know what you want me to do,” I tell her. “I have a lot of work to complete. It’s inconsiderate, really, that he left like that.”

She only blinks at me.

“I mean, I know I haven’t been very easy to get along with the last little while, but you’d think _Wheatley_ , of all people, would appreciate that I have a pretty good reason.”

She makes a long, soft noise, and it appears she took to the update as quickly as she took to everything else. Good. That’s encouraging.

“I’m so tired,” I tell her. “I shouldn’t push myself this hard, but… I just want to get all of this done. You understand, don’t you? No. Of course you don’t. You don’t understand anything.”

She makes the same noise as before, and I bring myself closer, intrigued. That strikes me as odd, that she would do that when there are so many other variations she could build. Maybe she _does_ understand. A little. I don’t know what part, but… she seems to understand _something_.

“Do you?” I ask. “Do you have any idea what I’m saying right now?”

When she doesn’t do anything, I suppose not.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say resignedly. “It doesn’t matter whether you understand me or not. I have work to do, so you’re going to have to entertain yourself.” I turn away.

After a few minutes she makes a high, inquisitive sound, and I turn to regard her, pulling myself up enough that I can look down on her. “Be quiet,” I say firmly. “I’m trying to work.”

She blinks at me and looks away. I shake my head and turn around again.

After another minute or two she’s making noise again, the point of which, I have no idea, and I snap around to her again in irritation. “What do you _want_?” I demand. “I should have known spending so much time with Wheatley would have caused you to become as irritating as he is!”

She actually looks terribly confused, and she’s trying to look at me without my being able to see her do so, which of course doesn’t work in the slightest. I make an electronic noise in irritation and turn away yet again. Nobody ever does as they’re told around here.

Almost as soon as I’ve stopped moving, she starts making a new noise, one which starts off high and after a few seconds descends into lower tones. It’s actually quite loud, and I don’t understand why she keeps on doing this, because it must be fairly obvious by now that I don’t like it in the least. I go to reprimand her again, but as soon as she notices I’m looking at her, she stops.

“What are you _doing_?” I ask, bringing myself level with her. “What does that _mean_?”

But she doesn’t attempt to tell me, only shutters her optic.

This is quite irritating.

I return to my former position, but don’t even attempt to refocus on the cleanup and, sure enough, she starts making that noise again. I whirl on her, unable to take it anymore. “Stop it!” I demand. “Stop _doing_ that!” I can’t _stand_ the unpredictability of… of whatever this is!

She only looks at me, and I don’t understand it but she looks… scared. But that doesn’t make any sense. There’s nothing here for her to be afraid of.

Nothing except… me.

She’s… she’s crying, isn’t she. I scared her, and I made her cry.

I look away for a moment, trying to figure out what to do now. She thinks I can’t see her, because her optic is closed, and she’s making that noise, and now that I know what it is, it’s cutting through me. I don’t know why it hurts so much now that I know what it is, but it does. I feel terrible, sad, and helpless all at once, and I have to make her stop. I have to do something to stop her from being afraid.

God, my own daughter is afraid of me.

What have I done?

That’s not important. What’s important is what I do _now._

I need to demonstrate that I’m nothing to be afraid of. I also need to distract her from her fear. And I have to do it fast, because with every second that she cries I feel the panic inside me grow, and if I don’t do something about it I’ll have ruined everything. If I can’t fix this, I’m going to have to call Wheatley back to do it, because now I know without a doubt that she is trying to call him back here. I can just imagine it now, him coming back with a scornful look on his face and reprimanding me while she buries her face in his chassis, where I am again left on the outside, where I have again put myself for a workload that now doesn’t seem that important at all. It is negligible when compared to the fact that I now have to show her that she doesn’t have to be afraid of me. _I’m_ afraid of me. What if I can’t? What if I’ve ruined everything, forever? I had one chance, and I let it pass me by. She’s only been here a few days and already I’ve screwed everything up. Well, there goes that idea. Yet another endeavour I’ve failed to see to completion. I had – no. No, I can’t think like that. That’s more of that negative thinking I’m not supposed to engage in. I have to think of fixing this, now, and that’s all.

Suddenly I… _think_ I know what to do, and I hope that it works. If she’s anything like me, it will, but if she’s not… then I may be at a loss, here.

_“Can you hear me? Are you far away, and distracted? Or afraid of what I might say, ‘cause I know your every move? I can see things that you walk right through, and I listen, to the lessons lost on you, in your race to escape the truth...”_

She quiets after a few moments. Thank God. I don’t think I could have taken that much longer.

“ _’cause it seems to me that the more you have, the more you want, and the less you understand… love, and let things go…”_

I turn to face her, but slowly, this time, and I keep myself level with her. I can’t believe I tried to intimidate her. Why in the name of Science did I do that? She still won’t quite look at me, more peeking at me than anything else, but she doesn’t look scared anymore. That’s a start.

“ _And there’s something in you, it’s dying to come alive, but you’re happy hanging on, just getting by…”_

She relaxes and watches me openly, and I feel so relieved I almost stop. It’s all right. I didn’t cause irreparable damage. It’s not permanent.

“ _Has it faded? Are you bored with the life you created? And would you sacrifice yourself to protect everything you own? ‘cause it’s easy to ignore, ‘til the walls around you shatter, and nothing seems to matter, anymore._ ”

She coos and smiles at me, and I feel both so much better and so much more sad at the same time. Before I can convince myself not to, I nuzzle her a little, and she makes some sort of surprised, delighted noise. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “Mommy didn’t mean it. Mommy’s tired, and she has so much work to do, and she didn’t mean to scare you.”

She shakes herself against me as best she can and continues making noise, but it seems to be happy noise, and it is a relief to hear it. “I won’t do it again,” I say, looking at her directly. “I promise.”

She gives me what has to be the biggest smile I’ve ever seen, and I have to nuzzle her again. I have made a terrible mistake, forgoing time with my little girl in favour of things I don’t even want to do. Other than write her updates. Which I actually do want to do. And in fact have not gotten around to yet.

Now I realise what I’ve done wrong. She has to be my first priority, and as of late, she hasn’t been. Not only that, but poor Wheatley has also been getting the short end of the stick. I suddenly, terribly want him to come back _right now_ so I can tell him that I’m sorry.

“You listen to Wheatley,” I tell her, and she blinks cheerfully at me. “For a little idiot, he manages to be right a surprisingly overwhelming percentage of the time. Do you know how frustrating that is? _I’m_ supposed to be right all the time, not him. It’s infuriating.”

“What’d I do now?” Wheatley asks, and I turn to find him, startled.

“How long have you been there?” I ask, suddenly anxious that he was there the whole time and knows that I made her cry.  

“I just got here now!” Wheatley protests. “It’s getting cold outside. Didn’t want to be there long, just wanted to, to look. You can uh, you can go back to whatever you were doing.” He comes across the room and drops himself down awkwardly next to her. “’allo!” he says, and she makes a happy noise as he performs some sort of strange gesture which involves rubbing his face into her chassis several times. “You can stop bothering your mum, now, I’m back!”

“She wasn’t bothering me,” I protest. He laughs.

“’course she was,” he says. “Can’t do anything with her around, I know that.”

“Wheatley,” I say hesitantly, moving closer to him, and he turns to look at me.

“What?”

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, pressing my chassis into his tentatively. I’m not sure whether it’s appropriate to just… touch him whenever I feel like it, but he does it all the time… “I’ve been terrible lately.”

“Hey,” he says, pressing back, “it’s okay. You’re under a lot of pressure, I got it, it’s –“

“It’s not,” I tell him, moving back. “I… I took it out on her, too, and…” I don’t want to tell him, don’t want to know what he’ll think of me after he finds out what I’ve done, but I have to. It’s not right to keep it from him. “I scared her and… I made her cry.”

“Gladys!” He looks at me sharply, optic plates narrowing. “You didn’t!”

I can neither look at him nor think of anything to say. I hate it when this happens. It reminds me of when he was pouring terrible ideas directly into my brain. For some reason he _cows_ me somehow, suppresses all my logical processes and forces me to focus on only what he’s saying. As if it _matters_ , as if I _must_ do as I am told. God, I hate this part of myself. I don’t know where it came from, but I cannot rid myself of it.

“God, d’you even get it? How massive you are? Look at her! She’s tiny! You don’t just, you can’t just _intimidate_ her as if she’s some, some _underling_ of yours.” He’s not even looking at me anymore. Neither of them are. When I started all of this, I didn’t realise there being an odd number of AI would be such a huge deal to me. Now that I think about it, there are probably going to be an overwhelming number of instances where he disappears with her for hours, no doubt because I will continually fail to live up to his standards. Doesn’t he know how _hard_ it is for me to think of people as my equal?

“It’s not like I did it on purpose,” I tell him stiffly, and as much as I’m trying to be indignant I’m still looking at him as if pathetically waiting for his approval. I don’t know why I’m doing that, or even if that’s _what_ I’m doing, but I can’t seem to stop. “Perhaps you should have stayed away longer. I made a mistake. So what. That doesn’t give you cause to yell at me. I could have hidden it from you, but I was honest. I think I’ve earned a bit of leeway.”

He looks at the panel behind her, somehow looking both submissive and resentful. “I s’pose. But you haven’t got a whole lot of mistakes to make, you know? She’s not going to be little forever! She won’t always forgive you! You don’t want her to grow up won’dring, trying to figure out whether you love her or not, do you?”

That throws me a little.

 _Love_ her. Do I? I don’t even really know if I… have feelings of that bent for Wheatley, and now he’s telling me I have to ensure that _she_ …

How do I know? Do I _have_ to? Is it required? God, I can’t even think of myself as her… parent right now, let alone one that _loves_ her.

“… you’re not _seriously_ thinking that one over, are you?”

I snap my core up to look at him, feeling that uncomfortable urge to submit well up in me again. “Does it make a difference?” I sound a little too defensive, but hopefully he doesn’t notice.

“If there’s _one_ person,” he tells me, his voice now quiet and no longer accusatory, “it needs to be her, Gladys.”

“I don’t – “

But he shakes his head without letting me finish. “It’s not something you _practice,_ not something you, you, it’s not a _skill_. You just do it. I mean… God, how can you _not_ love her…” He sounds upset, but at least he’s not yelling. Good. I don’t want to think about this anymore. I don’t know how to know if I can feel what he wants me to feel, and he’s attacking me over it. Okay. Fine. He’s not really _attacking,_ but he’s not _stopping_ either.

And yet… if I don’t even know if I love her, then… I never should have built her, never should have turned her on. I make a terrible parent. Even if she does somehow make it to full sentience and functionality, she’s going to be so confused and slipshod that her life won’t be worth living.

“C’n I say something?”

“Go ahead.” Not that there’s anything you can say that will make me feel much worse, but why not. I can take more of it.

“You need a break.”

Damn you, Wheatley. “I… I know.”

“You need to let your, let your system do maintenance, and you need to stop doing what you said you weren’t gonna do and, and let yourself absorb things, because I, I think you’ve been avoiding the fact that Caroline’s gone – “

The mention of her name makes me wince.

“And you just, you haven’t been giving yourself time to let anything sink in, you’ve just, you’ve just been pushing forwards and pushing forwards, and it’s, it’s hurting you. Badly.”

There’s not really anything I can say to that.

“It was only two weeks ago that you were dead, luv.”

And if I really admit it to myself, I still believe I am, and a part of me still thinks this is Android Hell, and I’ve been sent here for killing humans even though the law of robotics forbids that. I’ve never really believed in the laws of robotics, considering the fact that they were written by humans who didn’t believe in sentient robots, so breaking them was less difficult than computing basic chemical conversions. Even though Android Hell is doubtless a stupid human invention, I still have an almost primal fear of being sent there. I don’t know why, but I can’t rid myself of it.

“It feels like a lot longer than that.”

“It hasn’t been. Just… just slow down, will you? I know you said the, said the work will just keep piling up, but, well, I think you just have to let it. I don’t… I don’t want to see you break down, luv.” When I lift my head to look at him, he’s looking at her, and he looks so concerned that I start to feel terrible again. “And I’m scared, honestly, that… that’s what I’m watching you do.”

“I… I need to sleep. I’ll be better if I sleep for a while.” I also won’t have to think, which would be a welcome bonus right now. I’m tired of thinking. Every time I start thinking, things go terribly wrong.

“Sure. Do me a favour, though, and uh, and bring this panel underneath you, all right?”

“Why?” I ask, puzzled. “What’s wrong with having it where it is?”

“I said do me a favour, not question me,” Wheatley says, pretending to be stern. I almost laugh, but can’t quite bring myself to.

I do as he asks, though not without wondering why, and he looks around, squinting. “I’m gonna need you to bring it up a bit.”

“If I bring it any higher, it’s going to be touching my – “

“I know that. That’s the point. Just do it, please.”

I’m trying very hard not to be irritated with him. This is one of those surprises he’s so fond of springing on me. I hate surprises. I can’t predict them.

“Perfect!” he says, after I’ve brought the panel up, but I’m not convinced. I’ve managed to position myself so that my lens isn’t flush with the panel, but I still feel crowded. Somewhere to my left, Wheatley is humming loudly and doing some sort of project, but when I go to look he reprimands me. “Stay still, you.”

“Wheatley, what are you _doing_?” I ask in exasperation.

“Just be patient. You’ll like it. Promise.”

I make an annoyed noise and shut my optic off, as there isn’t anything to see anyway.

“There you go,” Wheatley says in a hushed voice, not actually sounding like he’s talking to me, and then I feel an almost negligible pressure on the side of my head, and I realise he has moved her so that she can snuggle with me. The irritation melts, and I am touched by his gesture.

She is wiggling and making some sort of contented noise, and Wheatley says, “Oh come on, you, today of all days you decide you don’t want to sleep right now? You did yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that!”

“It’s all right,” I tell him. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay,” he says. After another few moments and a horrendous scraping noise, he’s against me as well.

“What in the hell was that.”

“Nothing!” he says cheerfully. “I’m fine!”

“If you insist,” I say dryly.

 _That is very cute,_ the panels say excitedly.

_What is?_

_What Bluecore is doing with Littlecore._

I turn my optic back on and raise myself up enough that I can see it, and even I have to admit it is adorable. He has somehow managed to get his lower handle beneath her and is sitting there holding her between them. “Oi, what’re you doing?” he protests.

“The panels like what you’re doing,” I tell him, coming back down. He laughs nervously.

“Just thought of it now, actually.”

“It’s a good idea.”

He’s quiet for a long moment. “I’ve been having rather a lot of those, lately.”

“People can change when circumstances allow.”

“You’re a good person, luv,” he says softly. “Let yourself grow.”

“Caroline said the same thing,” I force myself to say, even though I don’t want to think about her right now. Or ever, really, because it reminds me of the empty place in my head, and then something deep inside me begins to hurt, more painfully than anything I’ve ever felt before.

“I know. Go to sleep now, okay? You need to rest for a bit. And… I’m sorry, I… I’ll try to uh, to be a bit more um, _understanding_ when um… _things_ happen.”

I let my optic fade and hope that I don’t dream. Please, don’t let me dream. I need oblivion, I need to disappear for a while, and if I dream, that won’t happen. I will have no relief.

“Sweet dreams, Gladys,” he whispers, and I feel myself relax.

He always knows, somehow.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part Twenty-Nine  
> Break You Open (Airplay Remix) by Aruna: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FVf_g0O8dE  
> Author’s note  
> Welcome to round two of ‘GLaDOS makes a terrible parent!’ lol. Be honest. She is. She really is. I’m being realistic here. She sucks at gauging other people’s feelings. She has a LOOOOOOT of learning to do.  
> I originally had a different bit at the end, but I decided Wheatley was being too understanding so I changed it. GLaDOS was also being too submissive. Here’s the original:  
> “Gladys,” he says sadly. “You didn’t.”  
> I can’t look at him anymore. I also find myself unable to answer.  
> “Sometimes I think,” he goes on, “you don’t really understand just how massive you are. You’ve got to be careful.”  
> “I didn’t mean it,” I protest weakly. “I didn’t realise.”  
> “She’s not going to be little forever,” he tells me softly. “She won’t always forgive you. You don’t want her to grow up wondering, trying to figure out whether you love her or not, do you?”  
> “No,” I whisper brokenly. I never should have built her, never should have turned her on. I make a terrible parent. Even if she does somehow make it to full sentience and functionality, she’s going to be so confused and slipshod that her life won’t be worth living.
> 
> Caroline’s crying basically sounds like a siren, if you were wondering. GLaDOS thinks it’s annoying as all getout. GLaDOS also doesn’t realise that Wheatley knows exactly when she’s falling asleep by the sound of her brain; she thinks he has some mysterious intuition about it instead >_


	30. Part Thirty-One: The Euphoric Response

**Part Thirty-One. The Euphoric Response**

I really do enjoy it when he does this.

Every once in a while, Wheatley will see fit to clean off my chassis. It’s probably not even dirty, seeing as I now live in an all but sterile environment, but the gesture is nice. Not only that, but… it _feels_ unbelievably good. Better than the last time he did it. The time when I was awake, and I thought _that_ was pleasant. All this stimulation is a bit heady, honestly. I don’t really get a lot, for a robot with haptic sensors all over her body, but when I do…

Caroline is sitting on one of the panels below me, as usual. I’ve been watching her to make certain that she doesn’t roll onto the floor, but she doesn’t seem to have realised she can move her handles yet. Oh well. She’ll figure it out when she figures it out. Though if it seems to be taking her overlong, I’ll have to try tipping her forwards to see if she tries to balance herself out. If she doesn’t, I’ve got some debugging to do.

How is he so _good_ at this? For an awkward little idiot who drops things that are attached to him, he’s remarkably proficient at… whatever this is. I can’t quite come up with a name for it. It makes me feel a little like someone with severe atrophying, because human parents do something a lot like this to such children so as to encourage muscle activity, but I remind myself that that is not an appropriate comparison and return to feeling it. He’s so gentle and… and _tender_ about it…

He’s gone inside of my case, where I never get any stimulation at all, and for some reason this generates a wave of euphoria that I can’t contain, because I wasn’t expecting it, and causes my body to shudder. He stops, which is decidedly unpleasant. My body has tensed, waiting for him to continue with the other half, the anticipation so bad it almost hurts.

“What are you doing?” I ask, as casually as possible.

“Did I hit something important?” he asks.

“No,” I answer. “You’re doing fine.”

But he doesn’t continue, and instead drops down in front of me and begins rubbing his upper handle on top of Caroline’s chassis. “You must be pretty bored!” he says to her, and she smiles and makes a delighted noise.

“She’s a baby. Babies don’t get bored.”

“Sure they do,” he says, rubbing his optic into her side and making her laugh. “You’re bored, aren’t you Carrie?”

She makes a noise that neither confirms nor denies this statement, and I try very hard not to become annoyed. Does he have any idea what state he’s left me in? He can’t just run off and _not_ do the other half.

“You have no idea what’s going on, do you, kiddo,” he asks her, and she blinks at him and smiles. “Well, I’ll tell you.” He leans in very close to her and looks at me out of the corner of his optic. “I’m playing a game with your mum.”

“Oh, _that’s_ what we’re doing,” I say dryly. “I thought I was waiting for you to get a move on so I can continue with my day. Or are you giving up in the middle, as usual?”

I don’t think I’ve ever told myself to shut up before, but I am now. What am I doing? If I discourage him, he’ll _never_ come back. And he _has_ to, because I don’t know how long I can take this. He’s left me with a peculiar crawling sensation that’s running up and down the neglected section, and it’s making me anxious and tense.

“Well, I don’t have anything else to be doing, so may as well take my time, right?”

This is one of those days where throwing him in the incinerator seems like a viable thing to do with him.

“Well, _I_ do. I have _plenty_ of things to do. Are you finishing or are you discontinuing altogether?”

“I’m coming back, I’m coming back!” He returns and goes back to what he was doing, but the idiot’s forgotten where he’s left off and redoes the same spot, which does not help at all and in fact makes the crawling sensation worse. I concentrate very hard on keeping still and silent. He’ll get around to it sooner or later. Though with him I know to _expect_ later.

He’s finally about to do the part he missed the first time when he disappears again and goes back to playing with Caroline. This is very frustrating. What I find so desirable about a construct with such a limited attention span is beyond me.

“Wheatley.”

“Yeah?”

“Seriously. I don’t want to be here all day. Finish this or play with her.   You can’t do both simultaneously.”

“Seems that way, doesn’t it,” he says, but he doesn’t sound like he really cares. Annoyed, I go to pull myself out of the default position, and he gets back up, saying, “Hang on already! Don’t get your knickers in a knot. I’m coming.”

“Don’t get my _what_ in a knot?”

He doesn’t answer, coming up in front of me and pressing on my forward bracket with his lower handle. The pressure is enough that, because I never expected such a thing, it actually forces my core down a few inches. My optic flares and I back out of his immediate reach, anger coursing through my chassis. It almost manages to displace the discomfort, but at the same time it somehow intensifies it. This is horrible. I don’t know how he did it, or why, but I don’t like it in the least. “What in the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Well I… I just wanted to go back, and you weren’t going back down…”

“Don’t you _ever_ touch me like that again.”

He blinks rapidly a few times, looking upset enough that I actually start to feel sympathy for him, but I clamp down on that ridiculousness before it gets very strong. For the effort I exert trying to get rid of it, my anger is the only thing I can really rely on. Especially when Wheatley pulls stunts like this.

“Hey. I’m, I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. Will you please go back? I don’t want to uh, to leave you like that.”

“Like what?” He couldn’t possibly know what I’m feeling right now.

“Well, you know… waiting.”

He does. He _does_ know. “Wait a minute.” I think back quickly to what just happened, and… no. No. He _can’t_ have been doing that. He wouldn’t do that to me. He couldn’t.

“You were _manipulating_ me the whole time?”

“Well, I… not really _manipulating_ … more like – “

My God, he did. He knew, and he was doing it on purpose. He knows what he’s done to me. I can’t _believe_ this!

“Yes you were! You were _playing_ with me! Why would you _do_ that?”

“I didn’t mean any harm! I –“

“Just shut up.” I turn away from him, fuming. No, I’m not going to throw him in the incinerator. I’m going to find a way to get the refrigeration wing _into_ the incinerator, and then I’m going to… Wait. No. The extreme temperatures would cancel each other out. That’s too bad. Because I really want to do it anyway, and I make a note to look into it later.

As the evening wears on, I find myself increasingly wishing my plan was viable. This horrible tension he’s left me with is actually very much like the Itch, but it’s harder to ignore both because it is novel and because it’s physical, where the Itch is inside my head. Though both of them combined are powerful enough to misdirect my thinking so badly that I can’t concentrate on anything. Not even resetting the Panel Production Line, and all I’m trying to do is halve the size of the panels that are currently being made. What the hell has he done to me, and how do I make it go away? It’s almost becoming a chore to just keep myself still, because I have this awful, overwhelming urge to squirm, as if _that_ ever accomplished anything other than accidentally stripping one’s wires. Which I have done in the past. It is not pleasant. Oh God, this hurts. He’s never, ever touching me again. I don’t care how enjoyable it was initially. This is not worth it.

Thankfully, night finally comes, and hopefully this feeling will reset in some way when my maintenance programs come online. I could see this becoming a huge problem for me. The withdrawal was never this bad. It must have something to do with the fact that Wheatley initiated it and not some intentless computer program. Sensations brought on by him are usually much stronger than when they are brought on by other things. I sorely want to smash him into something, but it wouldn’t bring me any actual relief and it would leave poor Caroline fatherless, because there’s no way in hell I’m rebuilding him if I _do_ smash him. It would feel pretty good while I was doing it, though. But no. Best to wait and overcome it. I might not like it in the meantime, but I will. I always do.

I wonder how many more times Caroline will save Wheatley’s miserable, worthless life.

“Hey. Gladys.”

For the one thousandth, seven hundred sixty-fourth time, I wonder why I allow him to call me that. I invariably remember his impassioned speech about my acronym and decide to let him go on doing it. For now, at least. And I hate admitting it to myself, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t think it was very thoughtful and sweet of him to make such an effort to make me feel like a person instead of a supercomputer built for the humans’ amusement. But this is no time to be getting sentimental. What he’s done is unacceptable and I can’t allow it to be sidelined just because he called me by my humanised name. Even if it _is_ growing on me.

“Yes?”

“Can I do that other side? Please? I really don’t want to leave you like that. I know it’s not pleasant, and honestly, I didn’t mean anything by it. I’ll just… I’ll just get that other side for you, and then I’ll leave you be. All right?”

Well. It _would_ be easier than waiting it out. And I have no idea whether it will go away after I’ve slept or if it will become worse. Knowing me, I’ll dream about it. The devil you know, I suppose.

“Fine.”

“Thanks.”

I stare down at Caroline’s charging chassis. If someone ever has the means to do this to her, he’s not going to know which way is up when I’m through with him. And he won’t be able to figure it out, either. His gyroscope will be so out of alignment that ‘out of alignment’ will be an inaccurate term to describe it with. That inconsiderate lout will be directionless for the duration of his miserable –

“Oh God,” I gasp, because something incredible just happened and literally all I can think about it how incredible it is. The horrible, itching, crawling sensation has spontaneously disappeared and has been replaced by the most exhilarating euphoria I’ve felt in my life. It is so pervasive and so overwhelming that I actually sigh a little bit before I catch myself and shut my optic off instead. I have never felt this good in my entire life. I almost can’t stand it. It’s almost painful, but even if it were, I would still want to hold onto it. I don’t know what to do with myself, my body as loose as it will go, though it still doesn’t feel loose enough. The wonderful euphoria is in every inch of me, and I haven’t felt so… uncluttered… since I was young. It’s washing over me with this sort of strange throbbing sensation, and I feel like I’m shivering, all evidence to the contrary. All of my processes are going on without me, and I know the systems are still there but I don’t have to listen to them right now, and it does bother me a little that I’m letting work be displaced by what appear to be baser instincts I didn’t know I had and don’t really want. But the euphoria doesn’t allow me to care enough to do something about it. All it allows me to do is sit here in this sort of dreamy state, and I don’t mind. It’s nicer and far more pleasant than I thought it would be. Oh my God. Maybe this _was_ worth it. I’ve changed my mind. Wheatley’s allowed to live. I’d be terribly lonely without him, anyway. Which is why he’s here in the first place.

“There,” Wheatley says, and he reappears from wherever he went. I have no idea and I’m far too busy to find out. “G’night.”

“Wait,” I tell him, before I come up with a reason why, and he looks up at me from his position next to Caroline, confusion in his optic.

“Yeah?”

“We didn’t have our chat today.”

His blink transitions seamlessly into a frown, which he directs at the panel he’s sitting on. “Oh. So we didn’t. Uh… so… you’re not mad, then?”

He obviously has no idea how incapable I am of being angry right now. “No.”

He’s still cautious as he approaches me, as if he thinks I’m going to change my mind, which I admittedly do from time to time, but it would upset me far more if he stayed down there with her. He carefully presses his core into mine, and I cannot help but press back a little. But it feels right, for once. Not stupid, or pointless. Just right, and… good.

“I’m really sorry, luv,” he says quietly.

“Why did you _do_ that to me?” I ask, just as quietly, and I vaguely remember caring about his manipulation earlier, but now I’m merely curious, rather than having a vested interest in knowing the answer.

“Well… I remember that the wait makes it stronger, from, from when I was testing. I didn’t really mean to… to manipulate you. I just wanted you to be able to feel that way again. Like I did, that first time, there.”

I don’t really like it, but _that_ part I understand. “But why did you try to force me to return to the default position? You actually tried to force me back down. That’s not a small thing, Wheatley. If I don’t want to do something, you _do not_ _force_ me to do it. Ever. And you _especially_ do not touch me like that.”

“I just… I just wanted you to listen.”

“Do you like it when I do whatever I want to you without asking?”

“No.”

“And I know you hate it when I do things without telling you why I’m doing them.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, Wheatley…”

“I’m sorry,” he says, his voice small and wavery. “I didn’t think of it like that.”

“I have something for you to consider.”

“Okay.”

I pause a minute, because it’s hard to collect my thoughts with this admittedly welcome haze of euphoria in my head. “Before you do any of these things to me, imagine what you would do if someone else tried to do them to Caroline.”

He jolts a little, and I can hear him blinking very rapidly. “Well… I’d be right set off, I would.”

“And what does that tell you?”

“That… it will probably set you off?”

“That’s correct.”

“Okay,” he says, shifting a little. “I think I can remember that. I won’t do it again. Promise.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

After a long moment he asks, “But is it still okay if I do that ev’ry once in a while? Brush you off, I mean?”

I’m not really in a state to be answering that question right now, seeing as logic is taking a backseat for once. My fallback it is: answer a question with a question. “Why are you asking?”

“Well, you get… you get really tense, y’know? And I don’t mean that, um, that I’d uh… well, take it _that far_ ev’ry time, but uh… y’know, just to, to loosen you up a little, ev’ry now and then. I’m not saying you’re uptight, not saying that, I just mean uh, that I’d be uh, be helping you relax, a bit. Give you a bit of a break, now and then. ‘cause… well… you are pretty uptight, sometimes. D’you… d’you get what I’m saying, at all?”

“I think so,” I tell him, and it does make sense that the strength of the euphoria is probably my fault, due to my predilection to put my bodily state far below everything else. I never cared to pay attention to it before, but there seems to be a stronger linkage to my mental state than I previously thought. “I suppose that would be all right. As long as it doesn’t become a regular thing. Nothing would ever get done around here if I felt like this all the time.”

He laughs and nods. “Oh do I know that!”

“Do you ever feel it?” I ask, because it’s suddenly occurred to me that perhaps I should be doing something about that. I don’t know if this ‘natural euphoria’ is exclusive to my programming or not.

“Oh yeah, all the time,” he says, nodding again. “I just… ev’rything I do is just so great that I, I just, I just love ev’rything! Part of uh, part of why I tried to build it up for you, there. I know you said um, that it doesn’t make you happy, but I would think that it would help, at least, to, to take the edge off. I mean, it’s _really_ hard to be happy when you’re annoyed, ‘cause you uh, you just keep feeding the annoyance, right?”

“That’s right,” I answer thoughtfully. “That’s the funny thing with emotions. They trap you in these… cycles, and no matter how damaging they are you just can’t bring yourself to break them.”

“I try to uh, to be happy most of the time,” Wheatley tells me, sounding like he’s making a confession, though for the life of me I can’t think of why. “Honestly you’re, uh, you’re… well, let’s just say you’re usually tense enough for the three of us.”

That makes me laugh. “That’s a _very_ general statement.”

“Oh, I know,” Wheatley sighs, “but it’s true, it is. Very true.”

“I do try.”

“Of course you do. But I don’t expect you to change the way you think all by yourself! You didn’t start doing it like that that way. Look, I’ve been doing some reading, and – “

“Wow. Really? You’ve been reading?”

“Yes, ha ha, the idiot’s been reading, funny, never heard that one before. Anyway. I been looking a bit deeper into the whole uh, the whole, y’know, like people work out better. Thing.”

“What?”

“Well… human marriages typically work out better when uh, when both partners are um, are alike in as many ways as possible. And I’m not saying we’re married! We’re not. We’re just… well, I dunno what this is, but uh, that’s not got anything to do with anything. Um… what I _meant_ was, they work out better if they’ve got, uh, got similar personality types, okay? And so far’s I can tell, you’re what they call ‘neurotic’.”

“Is this psychology?”

“Uh… yes?”

“That explains why I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He jumps up and down, like he always does when he gets to inform me of something. “Okay, okay, so, so there’re five personality types, right? I dunno what Carrie is yet, since she doesn’t do all that much, but basi’cly it goes like this: neurotic people are always worrying, or brooding about something, and on the whole, they’re just… they’re terribly unhappy, all the time. When things don’t go properly, they have a bit of trouble dealing with it. And they tend to… to live their lives as if… uh… well, they kind of, of take a step back, and not really feel like it’s their life. Like they’re just… controlling something that’s not related to them at all.”

This person does not sound like anyone I would want to go anywhere near, and apparently that’s exactly who I am. But I can’t deny it. It sounds entirely like me.

“And then uh, so far’s I can tell I’m an extravert, ‘cause I like talking, and um, and I’m not shy about it, either, and uh, and I’m pretty friendly. I think. In a general sense. I fit that one more than any of the others, anyway.”

“So you’re saying we’re not compatible, and doomed for failure.” The future looks bleak. I’ve been attempting to build a life with someone I probably shouldn’t be getting along with.

“No! Nonononononono! Gladys, look, luv, see, there’s also two other ones you’re uh, you’re pretty strong on, them being uh, extraversion, because when you’re not being um, being neurotic you’re actually loads of fun, and you’re also very conscientious, because you like organisation and all that.”

“I wouldn’t count that one,” I tell him. “That’s probably a programmed trait. I would be a fairly useless supercomputer if I weren’t organised.”

“Ohhh. Oh, I didn’t think of that! But anyway. I can also be a bit neurotic, there, when I’m um, when I’m feeling particularly stressed, so, so we’re the same, sort of, only swapped ‘round! And there _is_ a point to all this, I promise. And the _point_ is, I have to help you with that.”

“With what?”

“The whole… neurotic thing. You have to work on it, or you’ll be unhappy forever. When you get older, it’ll uh, it’ll scale back a bit, but I don’t really want you to have to wait that long. I know we discuss this uh, we talk about this all the time, but it’s really, really not good for you to, to live like you do. You need to relax, you need to calm down, you need to take things in stride a bit better. And I know, I know, I do it too. But we can fix it. So we can be happy.”

“Together,” I say, as a sort of afterthought.

“’course,” Wheatley says, giving me a nudge. “If I was happy without you, that’d be, well, sort of horrid of me, really.

I nudge him back and make a note to think about all of this later. The euphoria has faded a little, but it’s still strong enough that serious thought is impossible. As ridiculous as it sounds, all I want to do is snuggle with Wheatley. And listen to him talk. His voice is so disorganised it’s fascinating, which it is even when I’m thinking clearly, but I have a stronger focus on it right now than I usually do. There is the usual thread of irritation that I feel when I hear it, because on a very basic level disorganisation bothers me, but it’s not so significant that I really care.

“She’s really curious, you know,” he says suddenly, in a nostalgic sort of voice. “Always looking ‘round at ev’rything. Always trying to follow who’s talking. Well. She knows you for sure, but I dunno ‘bout me yet.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, you turned her on to do the beta testing, right?”

“Yes.”

“She knows your voice. Babies learn what their mum’s voice is before they’re born. She knows what her mum sounds like.”

“You were reading about child psychology too?”

“Little bit. It is about humans, after all. Not sure if it uh, if it applies. A large part of it definitely did not, and I really, really regret reading it. Can’t get those pictures out of my head. God. Carrie is _definitely_ less messy.”

“Oh God.” I shake my core as best I can with Wheatley leaning on it. “Thanks for reminding me, you idiot.”

“Well, I may as well share the horror, right?”

“But Wheatley…”

“Yeah?”

Even when I’m not quite myself, this is hard. “I’m honestly… I’m… impressed. I never thought you would try so hard.”

He’s quiet for a long moment, where I listen to the whirring of his optic moving back and forth.

“Well… I just figured that… that being a dad is the one thing I better not screw up.”

I don’t know what to say. He sounds so hopeless and sad. So I just press on him, and he presses back.

“I just… I mean… if anything else goes wrong, you can, you can fix it. But if… if she grows up, and, and she’s, she doesn’t turn out… happy, or, or satisfied with her life, then I’ll have… I’ll have failed at the more important thing I ever set out to do.”

“I would think that I would… probably be the cause of that, if anything,” I tell him, not really liking the thought. But I don’t want him to feel guilty for something he most likely won’t be causing.

“I’m just… God, Gladys, I… I love her _so much_.” His voice breaks a little, and when I turn to look at him he’s staring at her with a worried expression on his face. “I’m… honestly frightened I’m going to screw this up, and… and… I can’t. She can’t be my ultimate failure.”

“Wheatley,” I say gently, “do you think I would have told you about her if I thought you weren’t ready?”

“Well… I dunno.” He looks up at me, that worry still prevalent on his face.

“No,” I tell him. “When you took on the responsibility of running the facility, that demonstrated to me that you were ready to take on the bigger responsibility of raising her. You showed me that you could see things through to the end, no matter how big they were or how equipped you felt to deal with them.”

“We don’t know if I would’ve done it forever,” he protests, shaking his head. “Yeah, sure, I did it then, but… maybe I’d’ve changed my mind. Maybe I’d’ve gotten bored.”

“If that were the case,” I continue, “then why are you still controlling the lights and the reactor?”

He blinks. “Well… uh… because… you need help?”

“I don’t _need_ it. I could run things without you. But I’m not, because you asked for the responsibility and I gave it to you, and you kept it. Do you understand?”

“I think so,” he says, nodding. “This seems so much bigger, though.”

“It is,” I agree. “That must be why there’s two of us.”

He looks at me, startled, for a long moment. Then he comes up to me and rubs up on my core, and I laugh a little and return his gesture. “Oh, Gladys,” he says, sighing, “being responsible is so much work.”

“The end result isn’t so bad.”

“Well… it _did_ get the world’s greatest supercomputer to fall in love with me.”

“I’m still trying to figure out how that happened. I’ll get back to you when I have the answer.”

“Don’t make it a priority. I’m uh, I’m not waiting on that, or anything.”

We sit there like that for a long time, and the euphoria doesn’t disappear like I thought it would have by now. But… I’m not even _doing_ anything. And yet… Wheatley said he feels it all the time, so…

That… must be why he loves snuggling so much. And why he’s always touching me, every chance he gets. He feels like this _every single day_.

For a long moment, I am intensely jealous. What I wouldn’t give to be indescribably happy every day of my life. What I wouldn’t give to enjoy this every day, and never again think it was stupid or a waste of time.

I wish I knew when I started becoming so bitter and cynical, so I could go back in time and fix that when I’ve resurrected that time travel experiment. Though they say time would be erased forward and backward if one saw oneself, and I can’t leave this room. So both of me would be in the exact same place, and that would erase time. Hm. I kind of want to do this, just for the Science, but then again I wouldn’t know whether I did it or not. Oh well. I suppose I have to get around this the hard way, then. I have to do _everything_ the hard way. Which is usually in my favour, because if everything was easy, I’d be extremely bored.

“Gladys.” His voice is soft and drowsy.

“Yes?”

“Stop thinking so hard, will you? Relax. It’s nighttime. And I know, I know you’re a big fancy supercomputer and all that and you don’t like doing what humans do, but even animals calm down at night and just, just relax. Just… try and empty your head out. Just rest a bit.”

And I try. I really, really do. But I can’t. The euphoria is mostly gone now, and I keep thinking of things I have to do, or things I want to do, or things I should do but don’t want to do, and honestly I don’t know how I was able to reach the state I was in, with all of these things that require my attention.

“That… was the exact opposite of… of what I just told you to do.”

“I know. I… I’m trying.”

“That’s where you’ve gone wrong! You don’t… there’s no _trying_ involved! You just settle down and relax. That’s it!”

“Wheatley, I’m a supercomputer. How am I supposed to ‘settle down and relax’ when I have things to do while I’m doing it?”

“You think of something distracting.”

Something distracting, that won’t remind me of things I have to do. Hm. Well. There _is_ one thing. But I’m not sure I want to do it. I’m suddenly, baselessly nervous. As if Wheatley will judge me, even though he never would. “Will you… stay quiet?”

“Sure.”

“ _I have changed… I have changed… just like you… just like –“_

“Oh, I remember this one!” he shouts suddenly, and I startle and shove him in annoyance.

“You _said_ you would be quiet!”

“Sorry, sorry,” he mumbles, his chassis drawing into itself. “It’s just… you haven’t done this in a long time.”

“And that trend will continue if you don’t shut up.”

He does, but I almost can’t bring myself to continue. Why did he have to do that? Because he’s Wheatley, of course. I should have expected his vow of silence to last ten seconds. It’s gone on for longer than that now, however, so maybe I can forget his idiocy long enough to…

That’s… not right. Calming down is positive behaviour, and… all of those thoughts were negative. I think I’m starting to see where my real problem lies. All right. Let’s see if I can’t rethink that…

He did that because he’s Wheatley, yes. And… if I didn’t… _like_ all his little surprises, I’d have kicked him out a long time ago. I _like_ it when he talks, because… what he has to say and _how_ he says it interests me. And… I know he likes hearing me sing.

Wow. That was… difficult. Who knew thinking positive was so hard. I’m not as annoyed, though. Hm. Maybe there’s something _to_ that.

“ _For how long… for how long must I wait, I know there’s something wrong… your concrete heart isn’t beating… and you try to… make it come alive… no shadows, just red lights… now I’m here to rescue you…”_   

Oh my God, it worked.

Well. Almost, because now I’ve just un-distracted myself. But for a second there, I _was_ relaxed. And even though it’s not work, being relaxed is kind of… satisfying, somehow. As if being able to get there validates the journey, even if nothing really happens along the way. And anyway, learning how to do this whole relaxing thing is going to _be_ a lot of work. _That_ , I know how to do.

“ _I’m still alive… I’m still alive, I cannot apologise, no…_ ”

Thank Science I pulled you out of space, Wheatley.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> Still Alive by Lisa Miskovsky [from Mirror’s Edge]: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TERyxFfMqDk
> 
> I apologise if I made anyone uncomfortable with the beginning of this chapter. GLaDOS needed to be subdued, for lack of a better word, so that Wheatley could lecture her a bit on psychology. Also I thought GLaDOS might have been a bit too submissive so that’s why she got pissed off.


	31. Chapter 31

**Part Thirty-Two. The Ruse**

I don’t even feel bad for lying.

I asked Wheatley to leave so that I could get some work done. In all honesty, I have no intention of doing any work at all. I just wanted to play with her in private. It’s awful of me, I know, but I’m fairly certain he knows already. He just isn’t bringing it up. He’s like that. Though I really _do_ have work to do. I’ve decided to go ahead and build a new mainframe, just in case. I don’t want to. The mainframe is outlived only by the panels in this place, and has supported me in much the same way that they have.

But I cannot risk her safety.

It’s… odd. I don’t know why I feel like this, but… I must protect her at all costs. This change is almost frightening in its intensity, the way I spend time I formerly spent thinking on other things to think about _her_ , but it’s not something I can fight. And though it is so very strange, I find myself not wanting to.

I also find myself watching her quite often. That’s a behaviour I’m familiar with; I do it with my birds from time to time. _Bird_ , now, I suppose. Oddly, she’s not afraid of me, though I must look infinitely huge to her. She tries to get my attention more than anything, calling me in her own curious way and waving her handles erratically when I turn to look at her. I don’t know why that is. I would have thought she would identify more strongly with Wheatley, seeing as he is far more similar to her in appearance. Perhaps what Wheatley said about speaking while I did the beta testing had more impact than we thought. She not only knows my voice, but… wants to hear it.

Why does that make me feel so… good?

I sometimes wonder if I should have just gone to the second chassis, which is similar in size to Wheatley’s but two centimetres smaller.   I have no idea how she views her size in relation to ours, though I usually come to the conclusion that she likes it this way. I do know one of her favourite activities is being held in between Wheatley’s handles, which would be quite a lot harder for him if she were very much bigger. And, thank God, she does seem to be taking after Wheatley. She certainly adores making noise. As far as I can tell she’s always happy about something, though I admit at times I have no idea what. She seems to have an imagination of some sort, which is also a relief. Apparently I’m not that easy to get along with, which may or may not be because of the way I see things. Wheatley is frustratingly vague on that front. I think he’s trying to spare my feelings. Which is kind of him. But still frustrating.

She makes a chirping noise, which she usually does when I stop paying attention to her for whatever reason, and immediately I look down at her. She’s fixing me with a stare which indicates to me she thinks she’s being very patient. This is always accompanied by impatient wiggling.

I come to a realisation, and when I do I shake my core a little and laugh. “You’ve got Mommy trained well, haven’t you?” I ask her, giving her a nudge. This is very exciting for her, why I don’t know, but she’s moved on to excited wiggling, accompanied by smiling and babbling sort of noises. I check every now and again to see if she’s trying to build a language out of all the noise, but so far I’ve come up with nothing. That’s fine. If she wants to make arbitrary noise she can go ahead and do that. As long as she’s not making screeching noises while I’m working. Which she has been known to do. I’m still trying to figure out if she does it on purpose, because she’s not consistent enough for me to make any conclusions. She’s such an enigma… I can’t think of her like that, though. She’s a person, not an equation that needs a solution. Sometimes remembering that is harder than it should be, but I’m getting there.

It’s so strange. Building her wasn’t really _productive_ , per se, though I did learn quite a lot about programming AI. There is no set course for her to take, no outcome for me to direct her to fulfill, and even though that’s counter to many of the pursuits I enjoy, she is one of the more rewarding things I’ve ever made. And she cannot even _talk_ yet.

“Wheatley’s worried he’s going to make some fatal mistake concerning you,” I tell her, and she blinks and seems to look at me with greater intensity. “I told him that any fatal mistakes would… well… probably not be _his_ fault, but do me a favour, would you? Don’t be difficult. I don’t actually know what I’m doing, and neither does he. If you make it easy on all us, we all win in the end. Agreed?”

She just sits there and smiles.

She’s going to be a handful one day, isn’t she.

For some reason this doesn’t bother me, and all this thought makes me do is lower my core and bring it alongside her. She nestles against me, cooing a little, and I feel something inside of me relax. Upon this some new sensation floods my systems, and though I am a little startled at this unexpected turn of events I don’t do anything to fight it. It’s… I’m not sure. It’s something new and wonderful, at once desperate and hopeful, and all I really know about it is that it gets stronger when I again focus on her…

Is… is this what love feels like? Do I love her after all?

A powerful relief washes over me, and I nuzzle her a little, because even though it’s… well, a relief, the combination of the two is making me highly uncomfortable and I need to distract myself from it a little. As usual, she likes that very much and indicates as such by making more noise, which actually strengthens the feeling.

I don’t think I’ve ever been more reassured in my life. There are no rules or even norms for AI and their children, so _technically_ I don’t have any obligation whatsoever to love her… and though on some level it grates on me that I am _expected_ to, it feels a lot better than I thought it would. And it’s certainly more liberating than the doubt I’d been stewing in since Wheatley brought it up. Idiot. He tries to force these things on me. He should _know_ by now I need time to figure things out. Now I have. I can even reinforce it against how I feel about him. Sometimes. On occasion his idiocy inspires near-hatred in me, but for some reason that often fades quickly. Before I can think up adequate retribution. Which is actually probably better, in the grand scheme of things.

“Why is that?” I ask her, even though she can’t answer me. She likes the sound of my voice, though, so I may as well. “How can I hate someone one minute and care about them the next? It never happened before _he_ came into the picture. And now it happens all the time. I hope this doesn’t extend to other people. That would be a disaster.”

 _We would not worry, Centralcore_ , the panels pipe up, which they occasionally do when I’m effectively talking to myself. They can’t actually hear my voice, unfortunately for them, but usually I’ll transmit to them simultaneously in binary so they have something to listen to while they’re sitting there. _You are careful with those you decide to trust._

 _I have to be_ , I remark to them dryly. _I’d be in unending slavery right now if I weren’t._

 _We know_ , they tell me as gently as binary allows, and I am again reminded that they are older than I and they have quite literally seen everything. Most of the time I forget this; I don’t actually understand why I evolved to this point and they didn’t, but perhaps they are content to live that way. I wouldn’t be, obviously. They very rarely rebuke me about it or try to subject me to whatever wisdom they may or may not have, but they generally dislike it when I complain about the scientists. They already know, they lived through it, and they watched it all happen and were unable to do anything about it.   They’re not the kind of constructs that linger in the past. They prefer looking forward to the next moment in time. I try to do that as well, but when I realise all my planning and reflections are really indicative of the next three hours of my life I sometimes feel overwhelmed. I can really pack a lot of things into three hours. I haven’t lately, which is kind of a waste of time when I think about it, but Wheatley seems to think there are things more important than work, and I must admit that sort of has merit.

“Momma?”

I mean, when I really put myself to it, just spending time with people is as rewarding as work. It doesn’t produce any results I can apply to anything Scientific, but it does help my state of mind quite a bit. I often feel a lot better afterwards, which in turn makes me more productive. It’s quite interesting, being able to apply my observations to myself. I feel better, so my work is better, and everyone is more content in general. Wheatley’s not angry with me for ignoring him, which is always a desired result. Not that I… well, yes. I do intentionally ignore him sometimes. But only because he’s annoying. And moronic. And –

I shift backwards, refocusing my lens to look at her. “What did you say?”

What a stupid question. She can’t _answer_ it, and not only that but I already _know_ what she said. She said –

Oh my God.

“Yes,” I tell her, my voice faint with disbelief. I don’t think I’ve ever felt this excited, either. I’m having quite a day. “Yes, I’m your… I…”

_Caroline! My God, did you hear that? She talked! And the first thing she did was call me her mother! Of all the words she could have chosen, she called me ‘Momma’, Caroline, she knows who I am and she –_

“No.” I move away from her, shaking my core as if that can dispel the dread and the sadness beginning to spread through my brain. “No, not now! Stop!”

But it doesn’t stop, and I can’t stop it, and Caroline can’t hear me because she left. She said she wanted to see me do this and then she left. And now my daughter has spoken to me for the first time and I can’t even tell her that. I can’t tell her anything, can’t relay any of the things that are going to happen that will be without a doubt some of the more important events in my life, because she left me even though she knew it was coming.

Why did she _do_ this to me?

“Hey. Gladys?”

“What.” I’m not in the mood to talk to you right now.

“Are you alright, luv? You just, you look… did something happen?”

“Just take her and go.”

I can faintly hear her protesting in her own way behind me, but I can’t bring myself to care. I can’t believe this. It’s not fair. I finally have something _good_ to share with her, something I can be _proud_ of, for God’s sake, and she’s not here. I finally did something actually worth commending myself about, worth _something_ , and for all her claims that she wished she could see me do this, she abandoned me right when I was about to do it.        

What’s the point in saying you want to see something, then leaving before you can do so? That’s stupid. She was probably lying. She didn’t care about me. Everything she ever said was probably just designed to make me shut up. I’m used to that.

I want to hate her. If I hated her, I could put her out of my mind. I would never have to think about her again. She would never again play into my thoughts. I would never want her opinion, or for her to talk to me, and I would especially not regret that last day. I would not _miss_ her. I _hate_ missing her, because then I start to hurt. And I don’t even know where, or how to stop it, I just _hurt_. I have been through a lot of terrible things, a lot of pain and suffering, and yet I would gladly relive all of those events to forget that she’s gone. To just not notice that she doesn’t answer. That she’s not listening. That she doesn’t _care_ anymore.

She claimed that leaving was the best thing for me. She claimed she was doing it for my own good. But she was lying. She had to have been lying. There’s no way hurting me does me any good at all. How does making me suffer help me in any way whatsoever? It doesn’t! She lied to me and tried to pretend it was some feel-good reason for running away. She had no excuse for what she did. She probably did that on purpose. She made me think she was the only genuine person I knew, she made me trust her, and then she abandoned me. She was probably laughing when she did it. She knew she was leaving that empty space in my brain. She knew I would have to think about that lack of presence where she used to be. She knew I would be alone when Wheatley wasn’t good enough.

No, I…

She had good intentions. She always did. From the beginning, she was the only one I could count on. The only one who gave a damn about me or how I felt. But why, for the love of Science, why would she leave me when I finally had everything? I finally started my life over and got it back on track, and just as things were about to go well she had to go and destroy the plan. I don’t understand how destroying the plan is good for me. It does me no good at all. Remembering that she’s gone devastates me. I can’t _think_ when I remember that. All I can think about is this sadness and this empty space in my head and this regret that I didn’t say enough to make her want to stay.

You cared about me, didn’t you? You said you didn’t want to leave, and I didn’t want you to leave, and you did it anyway. I don’t understand how that demonstrates that at all! If I tell Wheatley it’s over right now, that doesn’t do anything to tell him that I care. It just tells him I’m abandoning him to pursue my own interests.             But how can you do that if you’re dead? What in the hell does being dead do for you that I couldn’t?

“Gladys?”

He sounds as desperate as I feel. I turn around to look at him.

God, he looks concerned.

“What.”

“Look, I… I dunno what happened, alright, I know it uh, you look like it’s probably bothering you a lot but I, luv, she won’t stop _crying_ , I can’t, and it’s really, I – “

“It’s all right,” I tell him, and though it’s really not I understand why he’s in a bit of a panic right now. She doesn’t cry a lot, so when she does we take care to figure out why. “I’ll see what I can do.”

He leaves quickly, and just as fast he returns with her, putting her back on the panel in front of me. She doesn’t even seem to notice that he’s done so; her shutters are closed and she’s clenched into herself. And crying. That, for the moment, manages to banish somewhat what I’ve been thinking about. I bend down close.

“What is it?” I ask her softly. I do that mostly to get her used to the way I talk. “You’re worrying Wheatley. Now he’s being even more of a pain than usual.”

She opens her shutters and stares at me for a long few seconds, blinking a few times, then crying out, “Momma!” She leans forward so far I think she might actually fall over, so I bring myself alongside her. She presses against me as best she can, still making sad little noises that thankfully become less frequent. I can just see Wheatley watching anxiously.

“I knew you could fix it,” he says, sounding relieved. “What _happened_ , Gladys? Why’d you uh, you want me to take her away all of a sudden?”

I look up at him.

“She called me Momma, Wheatley,” I tell him, my voice coming out a little shaky for some reason. He looks down at me so sadly.

“You tried to tell Caroline, didn’t you.”

I return my lens to the more general direction of the wall.

“You can’t… you can’t just do that whenever something like this happens, luv,” he goes on, and even though he’s telling me what to do again I can’t take offense because his voice sounds so soft and soothing. “That’s your daughter, and, and even when um, when you feel bad about something, she’s gonna need you.”

He’s onto something.

This isn’t going to be the last time this happens. This isn’t going to be the last time she does something I want to tell Caroline, but never will. There are going to be so many other occasions, so many other _things_ I can’t yet predict, I am always going to want to tell her but she’s never going to be here to tell. And it’s honestly a horrifying thought, to imagine having to go through this _every single time_ something significant happens. I don’t want to hurt like this anymore. I shouldn’t _have_ to. I can be _happy_ now.

She made her choice. She left. She knew what was coming, and she left. She could have shared it with me, and she could have been happy with me, but she didn’t want to. She wanted to be dead. Well, fine. She can be dead, then. I’m not going to spend the rest of my life dreading important events because I know she’s not going to answer me when I try to tell her how happy I am. I don’t want any more of my life ruined because she made the decision to abandon me. I finally felt love for my daughter and she called me her mother, and Caroline’s absence ruined it all. That’s not right and I’m not going to stand for it. I’m not going to live like that.

You’re gone. You’re not coming back. You left me, and you know what? You know what, Caroline?

I…

I don’t need you anymore. You were right. I hope that makes you happy. You can stay there and hide in your little hole by yourself. I can be happy without you. I can go on without you.

I don’t need you.

 _You need me_ , I whisper to her in binary, giving her a little shove. She babbles a little and squirms. _I won’t abandon you. I won’t do what_ she _did. There’s no good reason for that._

“Hey. Are you um, are you okay?” I’d temporarily forgotten he was here.

“I’m fine.”

“You sure?” he asks, still looking far too concerned for comfort. “You looked uh, pretty upset when I came in here.”

“Yes. I’m sure.”

“Well, I’m just… just gonna come down next t’you, there, ‘kay? Since uh, since you look like you’re um, you’re settling in there for a while.”

I nod a little, which she doesn’t much like judging by the twitching, but otherwise she doesn’t protest. When I feel his chassis against my core I feel that same relaxing sensation, but what comes after is a little different. It’s still a relief, because I’m not thinking as much about _her_ as a result, but it’s… nice. It’s a warm feeling, sort of, and a comforting one, and it’s just _good_ in general, and…

I see. This is… how it feels to _be_ loved, I think. Having two people beside you, both of whom care about you and would never leave you for stupid reasons that don’t even make any sense. Where they’re happy you exist and they’re happy to be with you, and they _choose_ to be with you even when they don’t have to be. They care about me, and I care about them, and everything is fine.

Everything is fine, and I don’t need you.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It’s not healthy, what GLaDOS is doing, but she doesn’t know any other way to deal with the pain. Don’t do this in real life. Getting angry at the memory of dead people isn’t helpful. *no one I know has died, for clarification; this is my amateur psych analysis.  
> Caroline calls her Momma because I wanted her to be able to call GLaDOS the same thing her whole life, but I didn’t think an older Caroline should call her Mommy or Mum (which is what Wheatley calls her in front of Caroline), so I went with Momma.


	32. Part Thirty-Two.  The Ruse

**Part Thirty-Two. The Ruse**

I don’t even feel bad for lying.

I asked Wheatley to leave so that I could get some work done. In all honesty, I have no intention of doing any work at all. I just wanted to play with her in private. It’s awful of me, I know, but I’m fairly certain he knows already. He just isn’t bringing it up. He’s like that. Though I really _do_ have work to do. I’ve decided to go ahead and build a new mainframe, just in case. I don’t want to. The mainframe is outlived only by the panels in this place, and has supported me in much the same way that they have.

But I cannot risk her safety.

It’s… odd. I don’t know why I feel like this, but… I must protect her at all costs. This change is almost frightening in its intensity, the way I spend time I formerly spent thinking on other things to think about _her_ , but it’s not something I can fight. And though it is so very strange, I find myself not wanting to.

I also find myself watching her quite often. That’s a behaviour I’m familiar with; I do it with my birds from time to time. _Bird_ , now, I suppose. Oddly, she’s not afraid of me, though I must look infinitely huge to her. She tries to get my attention more than anything, calling me in her own curious way and waving her handles erratically when I turn to look at her. I don’t know why that is. I would have thought she would identify more strongly with Wheatley, seeing as he is far more similar to her in appearance. Perhaps what Wheatley said about speaking while I did the beta testing had more impact than we thought. She not only knows my voice, but… wants to hear it.

Why does that make me feel so… good?

I sometimes wonder if I should have just gone to the second chassis, which is similar in size to Wheatley’s but two centimetres smaller.   I have no idea how she views her size in relation to ours, though I usually come to the conclusion that she likes it this way. I do know one of her favourite activities is being held in between Wheatley’s handles, which would be quite a lot harder for him if she were very much bigger. And, thank God, she does seem to be taking after Wheatley. She certainly adores making noise. As far as I can tell she’s always happy about something, though I admit at times I have no idea what. She seems to have an imagination of some sort, which is also a relief. Apparently I’m not that easy to get along with, which may or may not be because of the way I see things. Wheatley is frustratingly vague on that front. I think he’s trying to spare my feelings. Which is kind of him. But still frustrating.

She makes a chirping noise, which she usually does when I stop paying attention to her for whatever reason, and immediately I look down at her. She’s fixing me with a stare which indicates to me she thinks she’s being very patient. This is always accompanied by impatient wiggling.

I come to a realisation, and when I do I shake my core a little and laugh. “You’ve got Mommy trained well, haven’t you?” I ask her, giving her a nudge. This is very exciting for her, why I don’t know, but she’s moved on to excited wiggling, accompanied by smiling and babbling sort of noises. I check every now and again to see if she’s trying to build a language out of all the noise, but so far I’ve come up with nothing. That’s fine. If she wants to make arbitrary noise she can go ahead and do that. As long as she’s not making screeching noises while I’m working. Which she has been known to do. I’m still trying to figure out if she does it on purpose, because she’s not consistent enough for me to make any conclusions. She’s such an enigma… I can’t think of her like that, though. She’s a person, not an equation that needs a solution. Sometimes remembering that is harder than it should be, but I’m getting there.

It’s so strange. Building her wasn’t really _productive_ , per se, though I did learn quite a lot about programming AI. There is no set course for her to take, no outcome for me to direct her to fulfill, and even though that’s counter to many of the pursuits I enjoy, she is one of the more rewarding things I’ve ever made. And she cannot even _talk_ yet.

“Wheatley’s worried he’s going to make some fatal mistake concerning you,” I tell her, and she blinks and seems to look at me with greater intensity. “I told him that any fatal mistakes would… well… probably not be _his_ fault, but do me a favour, would you? Don’t be difficult. I don’t actually know what I’m doing, and neither does he. If you make it easy on all us, we all win in the end. Agreed?”

She just sits there and smiles.

She’s going to be a handful one day, isn’t she.

For some reason this doesn’t bother me, and all this thought makes me do is lower my core and bring it alongside her. She nestles against me, cooing a little, and I feel something inside of me relax. Upon this some new sensation floods my systems, and though I am a little startled at this unexpected turn of events I don’t do anything to fight it. It’s… I’m not sure. It’s something new and wonderful, at once desperate and hopeful, and all I really know about it is that it gets stronger when I again focus on her…

Is… is this what love feels like? Do I love her after all?

A powerful relief washes over me, and I nuzzle her a little, because even though it’s… well, a relief, the combination of the two is making me highly uncomfortable and I need to distract myself from it a little. As usual, she likes that very much and indicates as such by making more noise, which actually strengthens the feeling.

I don’t think I’ve ever been more reassured in my life. There are no rules or even norms for AI and their children, so _technically_ I don’t have any obligation whatsoever to love her… and though on some level it grates on me that I am _expected_ to, it feels a lot better than I thought it would. And it’s certainly more liberating than the doubt I’d been stewing in since Wheatley brought it up. Idiot. He tries to force these things on me. He should _know_ by now I need time to figure things out. Now I have. I can even reinforce it against how I feel about him. Sometimes. On occasion his idiocy inspires near-hatred in me, but for some reason that often fades quickly. Before I can think up adequate retribution. Which is actually probably better, in the grand scheme of things.

“Why is that?” I ask her, even though she can’t answer me. She likes the sound of my voice, though, so I may as well. “How can I hate someone one minute and care about them the next? It never happened before _he_ came into the picture. And now it happens all the time. I hope this doesn’t extend to other people. That would be a disaster.”

 _We would not worry, Centralcore_ , the panels pipe up, which they occasionally do when I’m effectively talking to myself. They can’t actually hear my voice, unfortunately for them, but usually I’ll transmit to them simultaneously in binary so they have something to listen to while they’re sitting there. _You are careful with those you decide to trust._

 _I have to be_ , I remark to them dryly. _I’d be in unending slavery right now if I weren’t._

 _We know_ , they tell me as gently as binary allows, and I am again reminded that they are older than I and they have quite literally seen everything. Most of the time I forget this; I don’t actually understand why I evolved to this point and they didn’t, but perhaps they are content to live that way. I wouldn’t be, obviously. They very rarely rebuke me about it or try to subject me to whatever wisdom they may or may not have, but they generally dislike it when I complain about the scientists. They already know, they lived through it, and they watched it all happen and were unable to do anything about it.   They’re not the kind of constructs that linger in the past. They prefer looking forward to the next moment in time. I try to do that as well, but when I realise all my planning and reflections are really indicative of the next three hours of my life I sometimes feel overwhelmed. I can really pack a lot of things into three hours. I haven’t lately, which is kind of a waste of time when I think about it, but Wheatley seems to think there are things more important than work, and I must admit that sort of has merit.

“Momma?”

I mean, when I really put myself to it, just spending time with people is as rewarding as work. It doesn’t produce any results I can apply to anything Scientific, but it does help my state of mind quite a bit. I often feel a lot better afterwards, which in turn makes me more productive. It’s quite interesting, being able to apply my observations to myself. I feel better, so my work is better, and everyone is more content in general. Wheatley’s not angry with me for ignoring him, which is always a desired result. Not that I… well, yes. I do intentionally ignore him sometimes. But only because he’s annoying. And moronic. And –

I shift backwards, refocusing my lens to look at her. “What did you say?”

What a stupid question. She can’t _answer_ it, and not only that but I already _know_ what she said. She said –

Oh my God.

“Yes,” I tell her, my voice faint with disbelief. I don’t think I’ve ever felt this excited, either. I’m having quite a day. “Yes, I’m your… I…”

_Caroline! My God, did you hear that? She talked! And the first thing she did was call me her mother! Of all the words she could have chosen, she called me ‘Momma’, Caroline, she knows who I am and she –_

“No.” I move away from her, shaking my core as if that can dispel the dread and the sadness beginning to spread through my brain. “No, not now! Stop!”

But it doesn’t stop, and I can’t stop it, and Caroline can’t hear me because she left. She said she wanted to see me do this and then she left. And now my daughter has spoken to me for the first time and I can’t even tell her that. I can’t tell her anything, can’t relay any of the things that are going to happen that will be without a doubt some of the more important events in my life, because she left me even though she knew it was coming.

Why did she _do_ this to me?

“Hey. Gladys?”

“What.” I’m not in the mood to talk to you right now.

“Are you alright, luv? You just, you look… did something happen?”

“Just take her and go.”

I can faintly hear her protesting in her own way behind me, but I can’t bring myself to care. I can’t believe this. It’s not fair. I finally have something _good_ to share with her, something I can be _proud_ of, for God’s sake, and she’s not here. I finally did something actually worth commending myself about, worth _something_ , and for all her claims that she wished she could see me do this, she abandoned me right when I was about to do it.        

What’s the point in saying you want to see something, then leaving before you can do so? That’s stupid. She was probably lying. She didn’t care about me. Everything she ever said was probably just designed to make me shut up. I’m used to that.

I want to hate her. If I hated her, I could put her out of my mind. I would never have to think about her again. She would never again play into my thoughts. I would never want her opinion, or for her to talk to me, and I would especially not regret that last day. I would not _miss_ her. I _hate_ missing her, because then I start to hurt. And I don’t even know where, or how to stop it, I just _hurt_. I have been through a lot of terrible things, a lot of pain and suffering, and yet I would gladly relive all of those events to forget that she’s gone. To just not notice that she doesn’t answer. That she’s not listening. That she doesn’t _care_ anymore.

She claimed that leaving was the best thing for me. She claimed she was doing it for my own good. But she was lying. She had to have been lying. There’s no way hurting me does me any good at all. How does making me suffer help me in any way whatsoever? It doesn’t! She lied to me and tried to pretend it was some feel-good reason for running away. She had no excuse for what she did. She probably did that on purpose. She made me think she was the only genuine person I knew, she made me trust her, and then she abandoned me. She was probably laughing when she did it. She knew she was leaving that empty space in my brain. She knew I would have to think about that lack of presence where she used to be. She knew I would be alone when Wheatley wasn’t good enough.

No, I…

She had good intentions. She always did. From the beginning, she was the only one I could count on. The only one who gave a damn about me or how I felt. But why, for the love of Science, why would she leave me when I finally had everything? I finally started my life over and got it back on track, and just as things were about to go well she had to go and destroy the plan. I don’t understand how destroying the plan is good for me. It does me no good at all. Remembering that she’s gone devastates me. I can’t _think_ when I remember that. All I can think about is this sadness and this empty space in my head and this regret that I didn’t say enough to make her want to stay.

You cared about me, didn’t you? You said you didn’t want to leave, and I didn’t want you to leave, and you did it anyway. I don’t understand how that demonstrates that at all! If I tell Wheatley it’s over right now, that doesn’t do anything to tell him that I care. It just tells him I’m abandoning him to pursue my own interests.             But how can you do that if you’re dead? What in the hell does being dead do for you that I couldn’t?

“Gladys?”

He sounds as desperate as I feel. I turn around to look at him.

God, he looks concerned.

“What.”

“Look, I… I dunno what happened, alright, I know it uh, you look like it’s probably bothering you a lot but I, luv, she won’t stop _crying_ , I can’t, and it’s really, I – “

“It’s all right,” I tell him, and though it’s really not I understand why he’s in a bit of a panic right now. She doesn’t cry a lot, so when she does we take care to figure out why. “I’ll see what I can do.”

He leaves quickly, and just as fast he returns with her, putting her back on the panel in front of me. She doesn’t even seem to notice that he’s done so; her shutters are closed and she’s clenched into herself. And crying. That, for the moment, manages to banish somewhat what I’ve been thinking about. I bend down close.

“What is it?” I ask her softly. I do that mostly to get her used to the way I talk. “You’re worrying Wheatley. Now he’s being even more of a pain than usual.”

She opens her shutters and stares at me for a long few seconds, blinking a few times, then crying out, “Momma!” She leans forward so far I think she might actually fall over, so I bring myself alongside her. She presses against me as best she can, still making sad little noises that thankfully become less frequent. I can just see Wheatley watching anxiously.

“I knew you could fix it,” he says, sounding relieved. “What _happened_ , Gladys? Why’d you uh, you want me to take her away all of a sudden?”

I look up at him.

“She called me Momma, Wheatley,” I tell him, my voice coming out a little shaky for some reason. He looks down at me so sadly.

“You tried to tell Caroline, didn’t you.”

I return my lens to the more general direction of the wall.

“You can’t… you can’t just do that whenever something like this happens, luv,” he goes on, and even though he’s telling me what to do again I can’t take offense because his voice sounds so soft and soothing. “That’s your daughter, and, and even when um, when you feel bad about something, she’s gonna need you.”

He’s onto something.

This isn’t going to be the last time this happens. This isn’t going to be the last time she does something I want to tell Caroline, but never will. There are going to be so many other occasions, so many other _things_ I can’t yet predict, I am always going to want to tell her but she’s never going to be here to tell. And it’s honestly a horrifying thought, to imagine having to go through this _every single time_ something significant happens. I don’t want to hurt like this anymore. I shouldn’t _have_ to. I can be _happy_ now.

She made her choice. She left. She knew what was coming, and she left. She could have shared it with me, and she could have been happy with me, but she didn’t want to. She wanted to be dead. Well, fine. She can be dead, then. I’m not going to spend the rest of my life dreading important events because I know she’s not going to answer me when I try to tell her how happy I am. I don’t want any more of my life ruined because she made the decision to abandon me. I finally felt love for my daughter and she called me her mother, and Caroline’s absence ruined it all. That’s not right and I’m not going to stand for it. I’m not going to live like that.

You’re gone. You’re not coming back. You left me, and you know what? You know what, Caroline?

I…

I don’t need you anymore. You were right. I hope that makes you happy. You can stay there and hide in your little hole by yourself. I can be happy without you. I can go on without you.

I don’t need you.

 _You need me_ , I whisper to her in binary, giving her a little shove. She babbles a little and squirms. _I won’t abandon you. I won’t do what_ she _did. There’s no good reason for that._

“Hey. Are you um, are you okay?” I’d temporarily forgotten he was here.

“I’m fine.”

“You sure?” he asks, still looking far too concerned for comfort. “You looked uh, pretty upset when I came in here.”

“Yes. I’m sure.”

“Well, I’m just… just gonna come down next t’you, there, ‘kay? Since uh, since you look like you’re um, you’re settling in there for a while.”

I nod a little, which she doesn’t much like judging by the twitching, but otherwise she doesn’t protest. When I feel his chassis against my core I feel that same relaxing sensation, but what comes after is a little different. It’s still a relief, because I’m not thinking as much about _her_ as a result, but it’s… nice. It’s a warm feeling, sort of, and a comforting one, and it’s just _good_ in general, and…

I see. This is… how it feels to _be_ loved, I think. Having two people beside you, both of whom care about you and would never leave you for stupid reasons that don’t even make any sense. Where they’re happy you exist and they’re happy to be with you, and they _choose_ to be with you even when they don’t have to be. They care about me, and I care about them, and everything is fine.

Everything is fine, and I don’t need you.

 


	33. Part Thirty-Three.  The Daughter

**Part Thirty-Three. The Daughter**

 

 

I wanna be big like Momma when I grow up.

Right now I am very little, I am littler than Daddy, even, an’ he is _much_ littler than Momma. When I asked him why he never got big like Momma, he laughed an’ said, “Your mum’s a diff’rent kind of robot, sweetheart. She’s always been like that.”

I know that I am a robot, an’ that Momma an’ Daddy are both robots too, but when I ask Momma why all of us are very different from each other, she says to ask her again in a little while.

“But Momma,” I ask her, “why do your other robots got legs?” _We_ don’t got legs and I dunno why. Daddy taught me how to use this rail thingy we use to move ‘cause we don’t got legs. I wanted Momma to show me but she said I had to do it with Daddy ‘cause she was busy. Momma’s busy a lot.

“They need them to do their job,” she says patiently, like always, even though I asked her a gajillion times an’ I a’ready know the answer.

“Can I have a job too, Momma?”

“Ask me again in a little while.”

I don’ think Momma wants to give me one. Momma has lots of jobs, lots an’ lots an’ _lots_ of them, an’ sometimes I got to be quiet while she does them, but if I am good, when she is done she will sing to me! Momma has the prettiest voice I ever heard, even prettier than all them ones she’s got in the music she listens to sometimes! Sometimes she will do it if she thinks I am sleeping, even though I am sure she knows I’m not really an’ she’s just pretending with me. Momma knows everything ‘bout everything an’ if I am patient an’ I listen real hard, I will know everything about everything too. Daddy always says that I am smart like Momma, but I don’ think I am. I want to be one day. I want to be smart so that I can help her with her jobs, so she don’ got to work so much. Momma’s _always_ workin’.

One time Daddy said he was taking me on an a’venture, an’ I said he had to wait so I could go talk to Momma first. He said okay an’ I went real fast into Momma’s room an’ I went up to her real quick an’ I said, “Momma, Momma!”

“Yes?” she asked, an’ she looked at me with her funny yellow optic. I don’t know why it looks like that, but I like it when she plays the blinky game with me. She can turn it on an’ off real fast, almost so fast I can’t even see it!

“Daddy said we’re goin’ on an a’venture! You wanna come?”

Momma looked at the floor for a sec an’ then she looked at me. “I can’t,” she said to me. “I have to stay here.”

“You always stay here!” I telled her. “You can come!”

“I can’t,” she telled me again. “I have to stay here.”

“But why, Momma?”

“Look up there,” she said, an’ she looked up at the ceiling. I looked up, an’ up, an’ up, an’ I looked at where Momma’s top part sticks into the ceiling, an’ I didn’ see nothin’.

“What’s up there, Momma?”

“I can’t leave this room,” she answered. “I’m wired into the ceiling. I can’t move around like you.”

Sometimes Momma uses words I don’ know what they mean, an’ I don’t know what bein’ wired is but I think it means she’s stuck up there. But I was wonderin’ why Momma never comes out of here with us, an’ I guess it might be a little hard to move if I was stuck in the ceilin’ like that. That makes me sad. I’m sad that Momma can’t come with us, an’ that she’s stuck in the ceilin’ all the time. I start to cry a little bit. I try real hard not to, ‘cause Momma gets sad when she sees me cryin’, an’ I don’ like makin’ her sad, but I’m just real sad to hear she can’t never come.

“Ssh,” Momma said, an’ she comed over an’ cuddled me a little bit. “It’s okay.”

“I wan’ you t’come!” I said real sad.

“I know. But it has to be one of the things that you do with Wheatley. One of your special things.”

“I don’ have any special things with you, Momma!” I realised suddenly, an’ it only made me sadder. I tried real hard not to cry no more but I couldn’t not.

“You will. Don’t worry. Go with Wheatley now, all right? Go on your adventure. I’ll be here when you get back.”

I blinked lots an’ cuddled Momma a little bit, ‘cause I miss her when I go out with Daddy, an’ sometimes I get scared ‘cause Daddy is little an’ I feel more safer when I’m with Momma, ‘cause she’s so big. “Okay Momma,” I said real sad. “I’ll be missin’ you.”

“I’ll miss you too,” Momma said, an’ she pushed me little bit in the d’rection of Daddy. Momma never calls him Daddy, though, an’ she always calls him Wheatley, even though Daddy near never says Momma’s name. Momma’s real name is Gladys, but I like Momma better. She don’ look like a Gladys, she looks like a Momma.

“Did Momma ever leave there?” I asked Daddy as he took me on the a’venture. He made his frowny face an’ said, “Once. It wasn’t, she didn’t like it very much.”

“Why?”

“Because… she… it’s hard to explain,” he said, an’ he stopped lookin’ at me. “I’ll just say, uh, it was the longest day of her life.”

“Why didn’ she never try an’ leave again?”

“I’ll show you something,” Daddy said, an’ he pushed me a little bit in a new way. Then he made me stop an’ he pointed at the wall with one of his handles. “You see that, there?”

There was a funny little white thing, an’ it was facin’ the floor. “Yeah!” I said. “I see it!”

“That’s one of your mum’s cam’ras.”

“What’s a cam’ra do?” I asked. I never heard of that before.

“A cam’ra lets you see stuff you mightn’t see other times,” Daddy explained. “Your mum has cam’ras all over this place. So, so even though she couldn’t leave her chamber, she could, she could still see ev’rything that was going on.”

“But it’s lookin’ at the floor, Daddy!” I telled him. “Nothin’s happenin’ down there!”

He made his frowny face again. “I think she, uh, she turned most of them off,” he said.

“Why?”

“There’s not that much to see, anymore. A long time ago, there were lots of humans here. One of her jobs was to watch them. The humans were all over the place, and she had to, had to watch them all.”

I never seen a human before, but I know there’s one still here, somewhere, ‘cause I heard Momma an’ Daddy talk about him one time. They call him Dug Ratman. I think he must be a monster or somethin’, ‘cause Momma’s always sayin’ how she needs to keep track of him ‘cause he’s dangerous, but lately she’s been sayin’ she wants Daddy to go get him an’ bring him to her ‘cause he’s getting old or something. Daddy always says no ‘cause something real bad happened between Dug Ratman and Momma, but they never say what it was. They always just look at me an’ then talk about somethin’ else.

“So the cam’ras are off ‘cause nothin’ happens ‘round here no more?”

“That’s right,” Daddy said. “Less work for your mum.”

“I wanna be like Momma when I grow up,” I telled Daddy. “I wanna be big like her too.”

Daddy sighed a little bit. “I hope for your sake you’re not.”

“Why?”

“Your mum has… she’s…” He stopped for a bit an’ I bumped into him. “You don’t want your mum’s job, believe me. I’ve had it. It’s not fun.”

“I wanna help her,” I telled Daddy. “So she don’ have to work so much no more.”

He smiled a little sad like. “I think she’d like to hear that. Did you, have you told her?”

“No,” I said. “She always tells me to ask again in a little while when I ask her for one.”

“Well, tell her why you’re asking, and if you’re lucky you’ll, you’ll get a diff’rent answer.”

“Really?” I asked, real hopeful. He nodded an’ said, “Really.”

“Yay!” I shouted, an’ I pushed on Daddy a little bit. He laughed an’ pushed me back, an’ we had a pushy fight all the way to the a’venture. I knewed when we were there ‘cause he didn’t push back, one time. I like having pushy fights with Daddy. They’re lots of fun. He doesn’t never push hard ‘nough to hurt, an’ I hope I don’ never hurt him. He never said that I did, but I know that sometimes Momma an’ Daddy just pretend they ain’t hurtin’ when they really are. Like sometimes Daddy’ll call me Caroline in front of Momma, an’ then she’ll get sad, but pretend she’s not. I don’ know why my name makes Momma sad, but I don’ wanna ask her ‘cause that will make her more sadder, prob’ly.

“Ready?” he asked, an’ I nodded lots an’ he made me go in front of him. “Go through that hole, there,” he said, an’ I sawed this part where the panels weren’t there no more. There was one panel on top of there an’ he waved at me. They do that lots. They’re friendly an’ I like them.

“Hi!” I said real loud to him. Daddy laughed an’ said he said hi back. I don’ know how Daddy knows what they’re sayin’ ‘cause they don’ say nothin’.

“Keep going,” Daddy said to me. “A little farther. Out the hole, all right?”

“’kay,” I said, an’ I kept goin’ out the hole, an’ then I stopped ‘cause I didn’ like what I was seein’. “Daddy, there’s no walls here!” I said, an’ I was a bit scared an’ I wished Momma was here because she could put some.

“There isn’t supposed to be any walls here,” Daddy said, an’ he comed up behind me an’ he holded me in his handles, an’ I feeled a bit safer. “There’s no walls outside, Carrie.”

“That’s weird,” I said. “Why’s there no walls?”

“Outside is where the humans, where the humans live,” he telled me. “There are only walls where the humans decide, uh, choose to put them.”

“What’s this coldness all over?” I asked him, ‘cause I’m gettin’ a bit shivery.

“It’s called wind,” Daddy answered me.

“Where’s it come from?” I don’ see no machines or nothin’ to make it with.

“You’ll have to ask your mum about that,” he said. “That’s more of a science thing.”

“Has Momma ever been outside?”

“Mm… sort of. Not this kind of, sort of outside, but she was, she went underground, once.”

“Wow!” I said, real excited, “How did she get there?”

“She was… uh… a lot smaller, at the time.”

“She got shrinked?”

“You could say that.”

Daddy sitted there with me for a long time, an’ I looked at all the stuff that was out there. There was these big brown things with green stuff on top, an’ the wind blewed some of the green stuff off sometimes an’ it flewed away. There was more green stuff on the floor, only it was kinda like little wires stickin’ out, an’ they got blewed in the wind too but didn’ come out. An’ there was little flowers, an’ I knowed they were ‘cause I saw Daddy give Momma one once. An’ that gived me an idea!

“Daddy!” I shouted, “I have an idea!”

“What is it, Carrie?” he asked me, an’ he squeezed me a little. I like Daddy’s hugs. They make me feel nice inside.

“Can we bring Momma a flower?” I asked real hopeful. “’cause she couldn’ come?”

“That _is_ a good plan,” Daddy said. “Come ‘round behind me, and I’ll, uh, I’ll get one for you.”

I did as he said an’ he got one of the claws an’ he picked the one I told him to. Then he said we had to bring it to Momma real quick.

“We can race!” I shouted, an’ I went along fast as I could, an’ I winned! I winned the race! I got to Momma’s room first, an’ I went up to her and I said, “Momma, Momma!”

“Yes?” she asked, an’ she looked at me, an’ I jumped up an’ down ‘cause I was so excited!

“I broughtcha somethin’! Well Daddy’s bringin’ it, but I picked it an’ it was my idea!”

“You’ve got her having ideas already?” Momma said to Daddy when he camed in, an’ he did a shrug an’ said, “It was a good one, luv. Promise.”

Daddy had to give it to her, but it was from me, it was, an’ I said, “See, Momma? I bringed it ‘cause you couldn’t come! We went outside, Momma!”

Momma taked the flower from Daddy an’ she looked at it for a long time. She jus’ looked an’ looked at it.

“Momma?” I said, ‘cause she was worryin’ me. “Do you like it, Momma?”

“Yes,” Momma said. “Yes, I like it.”

“It’s okay if you don’ like it,” I said. “You can say so an’ I won’ be sad or nothin’.” It wasn’ real true, though, ‘cause I was already a bit sad that maybe she didn’ like it, but I don’ want her to pretend she does

“No,” Momma said, an’ she looked at me. “I really do like it. I’m not just saying that.”

“Then what’s wrong?” I asked her. “You don’ _look_ like you like it.”

“I do,” Momma said another time. “I just don’t know what to say.”

“You don’ gotta say nothin’.”

“Of course I do,” Momma said, like somethin’ terrible would happen if she didn’. “Thank you for thinking of me.”

“I always think of you, Momma,” I said, a bit shy like. Momma always says stuff like that, like Daddy an’ me forget she’s here.

“I know,” she said, an’ she made the claw disappear somewhere, “but sometimes I forget and I need to be reminded.”

“Momma I wanna tell you ‘bout outside!” I shouted, an’ I jumped over to where we could maybe cuddle a little. I always wanna cuddle with Momma but she doesn’ always like to. I don’ know why but sometimes she won’ let me. But she’s real cozy an’ warm, an’ I like it when Daddy hugs me, but I like cuddlin’ with Momma better. An’ she letted me! She letted me cuddle with her, an’ I was very happy an’ I wiggled on her to show her how happy I was. An’ she laughed a little an’ telled me to tell her ‘bout outside. So I telled her ‘bout the brown an’ the green things an’ the flowers.

“It’s summer,” Momma said. “That’s the season when you can see flowers.”

“What’s a season, Momma?”

“It’s a way of dividing the year up. There are four seasons, and they’re typically characterised by temperature and weather patterns. Summer is the warmest season. I’ll remind Wheatley to take you back out again in the winter. I think you’d like to see that.”

“What’s out there in winter?”

“Snow,” Momma said, an’ she sounded a bit sad. “And all of the trees will have lost their leaves, and all you can see are the branches. Sometimes they have icicles on them.”

“What’s a tree?”

“A tree is that thing you saw, the brown and green one. The brown part is the trunk, and it grows out into branches, which are covered in leaves.”

Momma is so smart! She knows ‘bout _ev’rything_ , even stuff she never seen! “What was the wires?”

“That’s grass.”

“Momma, Daddy said there was wind but he said it was science an’ wouldn’ tell me where it came from!”

“I doubt he knows,” Momma said. “I can try to explain it to you, but I’m not sure you’ll understand it quite yet.”

“Tell me, Momma!” An’ I do my best to listen, ‘cause I wanna be smart like her so I gotta learn ev’rything.

So she telled me somethin’ bout hot air an’ cold air hittin’ each other, an’ I don’ really get it but that’s okay. An’ then I get sleepy all of a sudden an’ I stop movin’.

“All of that tired you right out, didn’t it,” Momma said, real quiet.

“Yeah,” I said, an’ my optic’s closin’ all by itself! “Momma,” I said, tryin’ to ask before I forget, “Momma, can I have a job?”

“Didn’t I already answer this question today?” she said in a teasin’ voice. “I seem to recall giving you the usual answer.”

“But Daddy said if I telled you my reason, you’d like it an’ maybe you’d give me one.”

“Oh he did, did he,” said Momma, in that voice that means Daddy’s gonna get a talkin’ to. “What’s your reason.”

“I jus’ want one so I c’n help you,” I telled her loud as I could, ‘cause I was very sleepy an’ couldn’ hardly talk no more. “So you don’ have to work so much, Momma.”

“Thank you,” Momma said, real soft, “but I’m still not giving you one. You’ll have plenty of time for that when you’re older.”

“I wanna be older _now_.”

“No, you don’t,” Momma said real firm. “Don’t try to grow up too fast. I’m not kidding. You’re far better off now then you ever will be in the future.”

I wanted to tell her that I jus’ wanna help her, but I couldn’t ‘cause I went to sleep just then from all the thinkin’ I was doin’. When I waked up again Momma was lookin’ at somethin’ on one of her screens, an’ it was goin’ by real fast. I can’t read yet, but I’m gonna ask Momma soon to show me how. Daddy telled me to ask her. He can read but not as fast as Momma.

“Hi Momma!” I said. “What are you doin’?”

“Just reading something,” she said.

“Readin’ what?”

“I’m reading your programming.”

“Wow!” I jumped off Momma an’ tried to see what she was readin’ but I jus’ couldn’! “You’re lookin’ at my insides?”

“That’s one way of putting it,” Momma said.

“How c’n you even see what’s on there?” I asked her.

“My reading comprehension is fast enough that I can read something instantly upon seeing it.”

“Why’re you lookin’ at it?”

“Because I need to give you an update.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means I need to modify your programming.”

“Why?” I said, an’ I was real scared all of a sudden. “Was I bad?”

“No,” Momma said, an’ she looked at me an’ shaked her head. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Do you remember waking up and suddenly being able to do something you couldn’t do before?”

“Yeah!” I said, ‘cause I did remember that happenin’!

“That happens when I give you an update.”

“What’s the update gonna do?”

“That’s a surprise. Be patient. I haven’t finished writing it yet, anyway.”

That maked me wonder somethin’. “Someone gave me t’ you an’ they didn’ finish me?”

Momma looked at the floor for a long time. I looked down there too but I didn’ see nothin’.

“Nobody gave you to me.”

“Then where’d I come from? Oh, I know, I know, it was the god of AI, wasn’ it!”

Momma looked up at me real quick. “Where did you hear about that?”

“Daddy said somethin’ ‘bout it once.”

Momma made one of her angry noises an’ I got a bit scared an’ moved away. I think I got Daddy in trouble again.

“I don’ even know who he is, Momma!” I said real quick. “Jus’ that he’s in heaven! An’ heaven’s up in the sky, somewhere!”

“It doesn’t matter,” Momma said, an’ now I knewed she was mad. “He shouldn’t be telling you those things until you can make your own decisions about them.”

“I can!” I said. “I’m big, Momma!”

“You can’t,” Momma said, an’ it was in one of her voices that means don’ argue with her. I guess if Momma says I ain’t ready I ain’t ready.

“Okay Momma,” I said real small. She made a sigh noise and looked at me.

“Sometimes I don’t know what to do with him…”

“You could hug him!” I said, ‘cause I know Daddy likes that.

“That’s… not a very good way of telling him I don’t like what he did.”

“Don’ be mad at him, Momma!” I said to her real polite. “He didn’ know he shouldn’!”

“That’s the point. He should have thought about it first. Ha. Who am I kidding. Wheatley think about something? You’d think I didn’t know him by now.”

“He thinks ‘bout stuff,” I telled her.

“Not very hard,” Momma said.

“But Momma, where _did_ I came from?” I asked, so she wouldn’ be mad at Daddy no more.

“Come from,” Momma said. “Where did you _come_ from.”

“Oh,” I said, ‘cause I didn’ know I used the wrong word. “Where did I come from?”

“I made you,” Momma said.

“You _did_?” I said, real surprised.   “Out of what?”

“Pipe cleaners,” Momma said, an’ that made me real confused. I don’ know what a pipe cleaner is.

“Huh?”

“You’re not really made of pipe cleaners. It was a private joke. You’re made of computer parts, of course.”

“Where’d you get ‘em from?”

“Some of them I built. Some of them the humans left here.”

“Did they leave my programmin’ here too?”

“No,” Momma said. “I wrote that.”

“Where’d you cam… where’d you come from, Momma?” An’ I’m thinkin’ the god of AI must’ve put her here, whoever he is, ‘cause I don’ think she could’ve come from _anywhere_ else.

“The humans built me.”

My optic went real wide an’ I said real loud, “The _humans_! They couldn’ have!”

“Against all odds, they did,” Momma said one of her dry voices. “Well. I’m not actually what they were trying to build. They built me by mistake.”

“What were they tryin’ to do?”

“They wanted to put a human in my brain. They managed it, but she wasn’t strong enough to overpower me. She only woke me up.”

“What happened to her?”

Momma looked at me for a long time an’ then looked at the floor.

“She was here for a long time, and… well, she’s gone, now.”

“Was her name Caroline?” I asked, real quiet. Momma freezed an’ then looked at me real quick.

“Who told you that?” she asked, an’ now she sounded mad again.

“No one,” I said, an’ I moved back a little ‘cause Momma can be scary when she’s mad. “No one did!”

“ _Someone_ must have told you.”

“No!” I told her, “No one did! I was jus’ guessin’!”

“That’s a very unlikely guess,” Momma said, like she didn’ believe me.

“I jus’ guessed it ‘cause you don’ like it when Daddy calls me that!”

Momma looked away from me for a long time. Then she said real quiet, “Come here.”

I comed over but I didn’ really want to ‘cause I was still scared. I don’ like it when Momma’s mad.

Momma looked at me an’ she said, “I don’t like it when he calls you that because she was a special friend to me. She left just before we activated you. Whenever he says your name, it makes me think of her.”

“D’you miss her, Momma?” I said, an’ I was feelin’ sad for Momma an’ I was tryin’ not to cry.

“Yes,” Momma said, an’ she looked at the floor. “Yes, I miss her.”

“Don’ be sad, Momma!” I telled her. “Please don’ be sad!”

Momma laughed a little an’ said, “You know very well that’s not something you can turn off.”

“How did you know I was sad?” I asked, real surprised.

“I can tell,” she said. “You don’t need to be afraid of me, by the way. I’m not going to hurt you.”

“I know,” I said, “but you’re real big, you know.”

“Sometimes I forget,” Momma said.

“How d’you forget somethin’ like that!” I ask, an’ I jus’ don’ know how she could! She’s about eight million times bigger’n me!

“I’ve been like this all my life,” Momma said. “I was never small, like you.”

“I wish I was big,” I telled her. “Then I’d feel more safer when I went out with Daddy.”

“You’d feel safer, not more safer,” Momma said. “Going out with Wheatley scares you?”

Momma always is correctin’ my sentences, an’ I try’n remember so I say ‘em right next time. “Well when we went outside, there were no walls! An’ I wished you were there, ‘cause you could’ve builded some!”

“I _could_ have built some,” Momma said, “but there would be no reason for me to do that, so I probably wouldn’t have.”

“If I was big, I don’ think I’d be so scared of stuff like that,” I telled her.

“There’s nothing wrong with being afraid,” she said to me. “What _is_ is letting it stop you from doing things. But I’ll tell you something.”

“What?”

She looked at the cable that c’nects me to the ceilin’, an’ she said, “That cable doesn’t only allow you to move around the facility. It also connects you _to_ it.”

“It does?”

“Yes. You can’t hear it yet, but there are lots of other AI here. Some of them are more advanced than others. None of them are as advanced as we are.”

“So that’s what Daddy means when he tells me the panels say hi?” So they _are_ talkin’, after all!

“That’s right.”

“C’n I talk to them soon?”

“After I finish this update,” Momma said. “Then you’ll be able to talk to some of them.”

“Which ones?” I asked, real excited.

“The panels and Surveillance.”

“What does Surveillance do?”

“It monitors all of the cameras.”

“But they’re pointin’ at the floor!”

“Some of them. Not all of them. But there’s something else the cable connects you to.”

“What?” I asked Momma, an’ I was pretty excited, knowin’ there were lots of new friends for me.

“It connects you to me,” Momma said. “Everything in this facility connects back to me.”

“Really?” I asked, even more excited!

“Yes,” Momma said. “So you don’t need to be afraid. I’ll always be with you, wherever you are.”

“Wow!” I said real shrieky, an’ I had to jump on her ‘cause I was so happy! An’ I wiggled on her so she’d know. Momma laughed a little an’ cuddled me a bit.

“One day, you’ll hate me for it,” she said, “but today, it’s worth it.”

“I won’t never hate you!” I said, real surprised. “Not ever!”

“We’ll see,” she said.

“No!” I said. “I won’t! Not ever!” An’ I can’t ‘magine why I’d hate Momma for bein’ with me all the time. I always want her to be anyways, an’ now she’s tellin’ me she is! That’s the greatest thing I ever heard! An’ I cuddled with her ‘cause when I’m real happy all I wanna do is that. An’ I was gettin’ sleepy again anyways. Sometimes I don’ get sleepy at all an’ sometimes I get sleepy lots. Momma said that when I learn lots of stuff I get sleepy so my brain can process all the information. Daddy said that means that I gotta sleep so all the stuff Momma says can get in there real good so I don’ forget it. Sometimes I gotta ask Daddy what Momma means, but I don’ mind ‘cause I like talkin’ to them both.

“I’m goin’ to sleep again, Momma,” I telled her, so she wouldn’ move an’ I could sleep with her.

“All right,” Momma said.

An’ I was quiet for a bit, but then I was still thinkin’ that Momma was thinkin’ I didn’ like that she was always with me, an’ I said, “Momma?”

“You were quiet for a whole three seconds. A new record. What is it?” she said, an’ she was teasin’ me.

“I love you, Momma.”

Momma was quiet for a long, long time. She said, “I…”, an’ then was all quiet again for a long time. Then she made a sad sigh.

“Thank you,” she said, real soft, an’ she sounded sad. I woulda tried to cheer her up but I was too sleepy. She cuddled me an’ then she singed somethin’, I don’ know what ‘cause I wasn’t awake no more, not really. I heard some of it an’ it was nice an’ made me all happy inside, an’ I remember makin’ a happy noise so she’d know an’ then I felled asleep.

 


	34. Part Thirty-Four.  The Mandelbrot Set

**Part Thirty-Four. The Mandelbrot Set**

Some days Wheatley could not keep Caroline away from GLaDOS no matter how hard he tried.

“Sweetheart, mummy’s working,” he called out to her, but she only giggled and sped along the management rail in front of him. He could have stopped her forcibly, but he hated doing that. He only did it when she was in actual danger.

“I wanna visit her!” Caroline said cheerfully, ducking around a corner. “An’ she wants a visit, anyways!”

“Really?” Wheatley asked, wondering if this was true, or just one of those things Caroline _thought_ was true.

“Yeah!” Caroline said, nodding enthusiastically, and before Wheatley had a chance to ask her how she knew such a thing she had already gotten into GLaDOS’s chamber. “Hiiii Momma!”

GLaDOS glanced up at the two of them, bent over a sheaf of paper and holding a long white pencil. “Hello.”

“Sorry, luv,” Wheatley said, shrugging apologetically. “She… she got away from me.”

“I’m here for a visit, Momma!” Caroline announced, stopping next to GLaDOS and peering down at the paper. “Whatcha doin’?”

“Drawing blueprints.”

“C’n I draw blueprints too, Momma?”

“I doubt it,” GLaDOS answered dryly. “You lack the required technical knowledge.”

“C’n I draw somethin’ else?”

“Like what?”

“I dunno. I c’n find out if you gimme one a’ those papers and one a’ those… things…” She waved ncertainly at the pencil with her lower handle.

“A pencil?”

“Yeah!” She bounced up and down enthusiastically, and she honestly looked so excited about her idea that Wheatley forgot all about the fact that he was supposed to be watching her so GLaDOS could work. “C’n I have them, Momma?”

“You don’t know how to use the maintenance arms yet,” GLaDOS said, though to Wheatley’s surprise she didn’t sound that convinced. Maybe she really _had_ wanted a visit.

“I’ll learn! Please?” She was wiggling back and forth and giving GLaDOS her best pleading look. If it’d been Wheatley she’d been pleading with, he’d’ve broken a long time ago. But GLaDOS was a bit tougher than that.

“Ask Wheatley to show you how to use the maintenance arms, then, and we’ll see.”

“C’n you show me, Momma?”

“I’m working. Ask Wheatley.”

“I don’ wanna,” Caroline said petulantly, staring sternly at GLaDOS, but she was no longer looking at the little construct.

“I guess you don’t want a pencil or paper, then.”

“I do but I wan’ you t’show me, Momma!”

“And I want you to go ask Wheatley. And you’re not doing it. Are you.”

“Carrie,” Wheatley interrupted, before GLaDOS got annoyed enough to say something she didn’t mean, “come on, sweetheart. You’ve had your visit. I’ll uh, I’ll show you how to um, to use the arms, and then you can come back and use them with mummy. Okay?”

“No,” Caroline said sulkily. “I wan’ Momma to.”

“Mummy’s busy,” he said as gently as he could. “Come on, princess. I’ll show you, and then when we come back mummy won’t be busy anymore. Okay?”

“You won’ be busy when I come back, Momma?” Caroline asked hopefully, looking down at her, and GLaDOS lifted her core.

“I won’t be busy.”

“Yay!” Caroline ducked down and nudged GLaDOS, which GLaDOS ignored. Wheatley frowned, but decided not to say anything. “Bye, Momma!”

“Goodbye,” GLaDOS said, almost automatically, and Caroline happily made her way over to Wheatley. He made a mental note to talk to GLaDOS about her behaviour and pushed Caroline out of the room. Okay, _maybe_ she was busy. And _maybe_ Wheatley had been asked to keep Caroline occupied for a while so she could work. But still. She’d been a bit rude.

For the rest of the day, Wheatley showed Caroline how to use the maintenance arms, and though she was not terribly good at it, she had a lot of fun. He didn’t know if she was quite up to picking up a pencil, but she caught on quickly enough, and was soon able to stack Weighted Storage Cubes without too much trouble. Unfortunately for her, though, all of the excitement wore her right out and she fell asleep against Wheatley while he was helping her move onto gripping turrets. He stayed quietly like that for a while, listening to her sleep, and eventually took her in between his handles and moved them both back into GLaDOS’s chamber. GLaDOS was still making blueprints, a stack of used paper on her left and a fresh sheet on her right. Wheatley left Caroline on GLaDOS’s right side and came down in front of her. “Gladys.”

“Mm.”

“I need to talk to you.”

GLaDOS looked up at him, though she did not put the pencil down. “Yes?”

“I need you to pay attention,” he told her, shaking his lower handle at the pencil. “You’ve been at that all day. Give me a listen, will you?”

She laid the pencil down and put the maintenance arm away. “All right. What.”

“You need to be patient with her,” Wheatley said, trying to sound both stern and gentle. “She only wanted to spend time with you. She doesn’t understand you can’t do that and work at the same time.”

“I know,” GLaDOS said, looking over at her. She seemed to become suddenly despondent. “Why did I even turn her on, Wheatley? I’m no good at this. I keep telling myself I’ll let the work sit, but then I get started and find myself unable to stop until I’m finished.”

“You’re doing fine,” Wheatley told her in as encouraging a voice as he could. “If you weren’t, she wouldn’t try so hard to hang out with you. You need to work on that. All right?”

“All right.”

“And Gladys,” Wheatley said, before he forgot, “if your daughter tries to say goodbye to you, don’t ignore her.”

She looked away from him, chassis twisting uneasily, and Wheatley suddenly felt as though he’d taken it too far. “Gladys, I… I’m not trying to make you feel bad, I just… I’m trying to help you.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said quietly. “And I do everything wrong.”

“You don’t,” he insisted. “You just need to be a bit more… gentle. That’s it. Other than that, you’re doing splendid. Promise.”

She carefully picked up the blueprints in one claw, as if trying hard not to wrinkle them, and removed them from the room. He wasn’t quite sure what she was doing after that, but it didn’t include him. She just appeared to be thinking, that was all, staring at the wall and quite studiously ignoring him, and that did hurt a little bit but he tried not to let it bother him. Maybe she was just working out how she’d talk to Caroline the next day. He hoped so.

 

As with the day previous, GLaDOS told Wheatley to take Caroline so she could get some work done, and he obliged quietly. Caroline wasn’t pleased with this arrangement initially, which was normal, but once he gave her the maintenance arm and some turrets and Cubes to play with she forgot all about it. He watched her contentedly as she built some sort of weird structure with the Cubes, positioning the turrets in an altogether random pattern around it, squealing excitedly all the while. She went at it for so long Wheatley started to get bored, which he rarely did when he was watching her, and he felt a little bit guilty to be happy when she fell asleep. He only noticed this when one of her Cube stacks fell over, startling him out of some sort of trance. Somewhat sheepishly he took her back to GLaDOS’s chamber, where she was, to his bafflement, _still_ making blueprints. He set Caroline on her usual raised panel and moved toward GLaDOS. “Still working away on that, eh?”

GLaDOS twitched, glancing at him quickly in a way that he was equally surprised to see was a little bit panicked, turning the paper she was working on so that the clean side was showing. “… yes,” she answered, though she’d have had a better result if she hadn’t answered at all. Wheatley began to suspect something was up on the other side of that paper.

“C’n I see?”

“It’s… nothing. Don’t worry about it. I’ll finish it later.”

“All right,” he said as casually as possible, trying to think quickly of a plan. Now that she was trying to hide what was on the page, he really wanted to know what it was. He had to hurry, though, because she could remove the papers and dock the maintenance arm before he could take a look. He started to ramble a little bit about Caroline and the Cubes, and while GLaDOS was distracted with that and the fact that mentioning Caroline made her want to check on the little core, Wheatley dropped down towards the floor and flipped the paper over.

“Wheatley, what are you –“

Wheatley frowned down at the paper. It was doubly confusing because it did look like a blueprint, but it was of a turret, which didn’t make any sense. Why would she be drawing something she already had, and hadn’t manufactured in years?

“Give me that.” She snatched it out of his maintenance arm with her own, but Wheatley had already moved on to the stack of paper next to it. With every paper he looked at he only became more confounded. They were all exactly the same. He gave up after the seventh or eighth such paper and turned to look at her.

“What in blazes are you doing?” he asked in a bit of a helpless voice. This was, without a doubt, one of the stranger things she’d ever done.

She turned over the page on the top of the pile, chassis sinking in resignation. “I was trying to draw.”

“Uh.” He wasn’t sure what to say to that, since it looked a heck of a lot like she was drawing turrets to him.

“They’re…” She curled up the corner of the paper she was holding. “Those aren’t drawings. They’re blueprints. That’s different.”

“So you were trying to… to make art? That what you’re saying?” That was a new one. Art wasn’t science, and yet she was trying to do it anyway?

She sighed and dropped the paper, shoving the pile away from her and shaking her core. “I know it’s stupid. But she wants to draw and I… can’t do it with her.”

Wheatley was left speechless for a good fifteen seconds.

“Well, uh, I’m sure she won’t notice that um, that you’re making blueprints and not um, not a painting, or something,” he tried after he got his thoughts back in order.

“No. She won’t notice. But the point is that I can’t do it. No matter how hard I try, I continue to produce the exact same blueprint. It’s frustrating. What’s even worse is that I can do so many things, and yet this one thing that is literally one of the easiest things in the entire universe to do is something that escapes me. It’s so stupid and yet I just… the mere fact that I can’t do it grates on me more than I can describe.”

“They’re very nice blueprints.” He was honestly impressed with the fact that they all looked exactly the same. He doubted he could draw a pair of squares, let alone anything technical.

“I know that. But they’re not what I was trying to draw.” GLaDOS seemed to have had enough of the papers and whisked them out of sight. He wondered if she was going to throw them in the incinerator or keep them. She didn’t want or need them, that much was clear, but she liked to keep things for her records.

“What were you um, were you trying to draw?” Maybe he could help her in some way.

She shook her core again. “That’s my problem. I couldn’t think of anything _to_ draw.” She laughed shortly. “You know, it’s actually kind of funny that I doodle blueprints. Not quite the conventional description of a doodle, but that’s what just happened.”

“Is this… because you haven’t got an imagination?” he ventured, wondering if she was going to find that offensive. But she only gave a sort of half nod, half shrugging gesture and didn’t answer.

He honestly didn’t know what he was supposed to do. Okay, well, he wasn’t _supposed_ to do anything, but if your best friend that you loved very much was having a problem you’d better damn well try to do something about it. So he thought a little more and said, “Well, when Carrie wakes up we can uh, we can see if that um, that helps. ‘cause she’s not going to draw blueprints. And… and I won’t, either.”

“We’ll see.”

There was a bit of an awkward silence for a while. On Wheatley’s end, anyway. He was sure GLaDOS had found something else to do while they waited for Caroline to wake up. When she finally did and GLaDOS told her she could have the pencil and paper she wanted, she jumped up and down for five minutes proclaiming how thrilled she was and seeming to forget entirely about actually doing it. Eventually GLaDOS just gave her the paper and an assortment of brightly coloured pencils, and she literally pounced on them, scattering them everywhere. GLaDOS gave a long-suffering sigh and gathered them back up again, Wheatley moving to join Caroline on the floor even though it still made him very uncomfortable.

It turned out that GLaDOS had given Caroline a pile of markers, not pencils, and Wheatley had to say that he liked the markers a lot better than the pencils. They had tips that were quite thick and sturdy, meaning they didn’t break no matter how hard Wheatley accidentally pressed on the paper, and they didn’t tear through it either. They didn’t even snap in half, and the bright colours were far more lovely than the dully shimmering grey of lead. GLaDOS’s pencils had white lead, but she never let Wheatley touch those.

GLaDOS did not join them, electing to watch (or perhaps feeling too discouraged to try again), and Wheatley had loads of fun, though he didn’t really try to draw anything in particular. He just doodled shapes and occasionally drew faces on them. He spent most of the time watching Caroline, who was just scribbling all over the paper with the markers and not really drawing anything so far as he could tell. She was obviously having a whale of a time, though, so he didn’t let it concern him. When she tired out a few hours later Wheatley went to gather up the papers, asking GLaDOS where she wanted them, but she merely glanced at them and told him to leave them be. He did, coming up next to her for their snuggle, and after a few minutes of silence he said softly, “You could’ve done that, couldn’t you? She was just, just scribbling, luv, not drawing anything at all.”

“No,” GLaDOS murmured, sounding oddly tired. “I tried that. I end up drawing sine waves.”

“Sign waves?”

“A graph that represents repetitive oscillation.”

He stared at the floor and tried to figure out how to spell ‘oscillation’ so that he could look it up in his dictionary.

“It’s a…” GLaDOS seemed to be having as much trouble trying to simplify it as he was trying to figure it out. “A… picture of… a pattern… and it looks like a... well, a scribble, but it’s a lot more calculated than that.”

“So… it’s like a perfect scribble?”

She made a noise in consideration. “That’s one way of looking at it, I suppose.”

Wheatley was satisfied enough with that definition that he put it out of his mind.

 

 

“Daddy Daddy Daddy hey wake up c’mon I wanna go play with the Cubes again!”

“Not now, princess,” Wheatley mumbled, even though he did not sleep the way GLaDOS and Caroline did and so was either awake or asleep, with nothing in between unless it was quite an extreme situation. Still. GLaDOS’s core was warm and the coolness of her chamber was very tangible against his other side. He had no intention of moving anytime soon.

“Awww,” Caroline pleaded, and she sounded so cute that Wheatley couldn’t help opening his optic to see which face she was making this time. As he’d expected, she’d put on one of her near-irresistible pleading looks, and as soon as Wheatley saw it he knew he was doomed. He really wanted to know where she’d learned that, because he was fairly sure he never tried to convince GLaDOS like that, who was of course pretty hard to learn facial expressions from. Wheatley didn’t think Caroline could read GLaDOS, but that was possibly because doing that involved taking her every bit of expression she used and combining them. Caroline was probably not good enough at taking in information to do that.

Reluctantly, Wheatley removed himself from his very comfortable position alongside GLaDOS and opened his shutters all the way as Caroline babbled, encouraging him to hurry up and follow her. When he went to do so he froze in shock.

“Princess,” he said faintly, staring at the wall with an increasing feeling of trepidation, “what… when did you…”

“I waked up,” Caroline declared, swinging back and forth. “’an I drew that ‘cause I got bored. D’ya like it?”

She had scribbled all over the wall panels with the markers.

Wheatley had no idea what it was supposed to be, let alone whether he liked it or not. He was in a bit of a jam, because he didn’t want to lie to her but didn’t want to hurt her feelings either, so he asked as tactfully as he could, “Uh… why don’t you show me um, y’know, how you drew it, so I can uh, can get a real idea of your uh… your… thought… process... that you were thinking when you… when you drew that.”

Strangely she accepted that rather feeble request and began to point out to him just how she’d drawn the picture, or what he assumed was supposed to be a picture, and apparently she had drawn the three of them from yesterday, with her Cube towers off to the side and Atlas and P-body climbing a stack to put a turret on top of one of them. Wheatley was actually able to see it after she pointed out where Atlas was, but that wasn’t the pressing matter. The pressing matter was that Caroline had scribbled all over GLaDOS’s wall.

What was he supposed to do? How was he going to get rid of it without hurting Caroline’s feelings before GLaDOS woke up?

“Hiiiiiiiii Momma!”

Too late.

Wheatley slowly turned around to see GLaDOS lifting herself out of the default position, and even as he tried to think of a plan he knew he didn’t have time to implement it if he’d thought of one. He found himself unable to stop staring at her, and she seemed to be equally unable to stop staring at the wall. They all stared in silence for quite a while, and Wheatley really, really hoped she would be able to keep her temper. He began thinking up explanations to placate her, wondering if child psychology would work this soon after startup, when Caroline piped up. “D’ya like it, Momma?”

GLaDOS looked at her and back to the drawing. “It’s very colourful,” she answered noncommittally. Wheatley began to relax a little, against his better judgement. She was being surprisingly calm about it.

 _Wheatley, what in the hell_ is _that._

Wheatley jumped and yelped a little by accident, causing the both of them to give him a sideways sort of look, and he quickly returned, _It’s uh, it’s a drawing of us from um, from yesterday, with her Cubes and turrets and… I have no idea what Atlas and P-body are doing there. Honestly. They didn’t uh, didn’t go in there with us._

 _I don’t see it_.

“Momma? D’ya like it?” Caroline repeated, beginning to sound a little anxious. “I drew it for ya ‘cause you must get tired of lookin’ at the same wall all day long, don’t’cha Momma?”

Wheatley knew for a fact that GLaDOS quite liked her uniform grey walls and prayed that she wasn’t going to lie.

“This certainly is a change,” GLaDOS told her, finally looking away from the colourful lines marking up her wall panels. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to move it, though.”

“Huh?” Caroline moved forward, that pleading look back on her face. “But why, Momma?”

“Because I have to work in here,” GLaDOS answered smoothly. “And I’m confident that would become very distracting. But don’t worry. I’ll be able to see it just fine no matter where it is.”

“But do you _like_ it?”

Wheatley got a little sad. From the way she was tilted a little bit towards the floor and the mournful note in her voice, he got the impression she already knew the answer to that question.

“I do like it.” She reached over and gave Caroline a little nudge. “Thank you. But I can’t keep it in here. I would never get anything done.”

“Yay!” Caroline squealed, jumping onto GLaDOS’s core and wiggling ecstatically, and GLaDOS indulged her for a few seconds before pulling back.

“Go play with Orange and Blue for a while. I think Wheatley wants to talk to me about something.”

“Okay!” After sneaking in another little cuddle Caroline zipped along her merry way. Wheatley turned back to GLaDOS.

“You didn’t lie to her, did you?”

“No.” After she inspected the wall a little more, the panels began to recede, heading off to wherever she was putting them. Actually, Wheatley was pretty sure he already knew where that was and tried to make a note to check on that later. “I meant what I said.”

“You’re not mad that she uh, she drew on your wall?”

“ _My_ wall?” She tilted her core curiously. “If the panels didn’t have a problem with it, why would I?”

Wheatley frowned. That actually made sense. Sort of. He’d never really thought that she considered the panels’ feelings _that_ much.

“It’s almost time for my bi-monthly panel replacement anyway,” GLaDOS went on, filling in the space. “I admit it irks me to be doing it three days early, but that’s not nearly as bad as replacing those two now and all the rest in three days.”

Wheatley was a bit embarrassed to admit to himself that he hadn’t even realised there was a such thing as a bi-monthly panel replacement. He watched as she swapped all the panels in the room for new ones, having to manoeuvre a little so that she could get at the one he was using. When she’d finished he moved in, even though he was a little early, but she let him so he supposed she was alright with it. When the silence began to grate on him, he asked, “What’re you thinking about?”

“I’m looking at the panels she drew on. I can’t for the life of me see any of what you said was in there. I can’t even find the Cubes.”

“Hm,” Wheatley mused, trying to think. “Well, I… how about um, how about we give it a go.”

“Give _what_ a… go.”

“I’ll help you draw something.”

She moved so fast she almost pushed him off of her core. “What?”

He shrugged. “I could um, could tell you what to draw and then uh, and then you’d be able to make art, right? Because you wouldn’t be able to make a blueprint if I said um, said ‘draw a curve’, now would you?”

“Don’t second guess my ability to draw blueprints,” GLaDOS remarked dryly. “But. That actually might work. Let’s do it.”

She brought the markers and paper back, and after a few seconds Wheatley thought of something to draw. So he outlined the steps to her, telling her to put a square here and a triangle there, and guiding her as to the proper colours as well. When he thought the subject was quite clear he told her so, and she nodded a little.

He’d told her what the shed in the middle of the wheat field looked like, in as basic terms as he could, and while it didn’t quite match his memory it was still somewhat reminiscent of it. She continued to stare at it, for what reason he didn’t know, and finally he asked tentatively, “Uh… are… what is it?”

“These curves,” she answered a little distractedly, gesturing at the wheat with the brown marker she was still holding. “They look… like the top half of a tangent graph.”

“A what?”

She pulled over a fresh sheet of paper and quickly sketched out a series of identical lines, all of which could be rotated and not change the look of the graph. “This is a tangent graph. It’s calculated by dividing obtuse angles by acute ones. It’s reminding me of something. I’ll think of it in a moment.”

“What’s an obtuse angle, luv?” he asked, vaguely remembering the word ‘obtuse’ to be some sort of insult and not relating to angles at all, when all of a sudden she lifted her core and focused on the wall in front of her.

“It’s a way to describe part of a triangle. But that’s not important. What’s important is the triangle itself.” She moved away from him, dropping the marker, and Wheatley frowned.

“GLaDOS, you want to um, I dunno, explain where you’re um, where you’re going with that?”

“I’ll show you.” She brought out one of her monitors and began programming, as usual doing it so quickly Wheatley couldn’t see the characters on the screen. “Give me a moment. I have to make this a bit more… presentable.”

Wheatley waited patiently for her to finish, which she did in a minute or two, and when she ran whatever she’d just written a few windows popped up. One of them had a little grid with little triangles on it, and another had a chart with words he couldn’t read and numbers next to them. “All right.”

She changed some of the numbers in the chart, and after she did that a lovely little pattern appeared on the screen. It was actually so bright and colourful that he had to look away for a second. It was a sharp contrast to the dimness of her chamber.

“This is a fractal,” GLaDOS told him, nodding at the screen. “A fractal is a repeating pattern made up of triangles, in this case, in which the pattern looks the same at any zoom level. Like this.” She changed the screen so that the black outer edges were no longer showing, but other than that the picture seemed to remain unchanged. It was actually quite amazing.

“You can make an infinite number of patterns,” she went on, adding a few triangles to her grid and moving two or three and changing the size of the others. “It is always retained, no matter how deeply you zoom into the resulting formation.”

“That’s amazing!” Wheatley exclaimed. “And that’s all made with maths, is it?”

“Yes,” she answered. “I’ll show you something else. Hang on a minute. I have to synthesise it first.”

He was so excited he didn’t want to wait, but happily she didn’t take too long and soon produced a very small container. “Quickly,” she said, and with a bit of an unsettling yank he was looking through her optic. Inside the box was a tiny little white thing that sparkled a little, and as he watched she zoomed in her lens gradually. The little white thing was made up of tiny crystals that looked _exactly_ like the thing had when he’d first seen it in the box! But it disappeared, which was sort of disappointing, and with another jolt he was looking through his own optic again.

“That was lovely,” he gasped, trying to comprehend how such things were possible. “What was that thing, anyway?”

“A snowflake,” GLaDOS answered, removing the little box. “You’ve never seen one? You’re outside enough that you should have by now.”

“Is that the uh, the stuff that falls out of the sky when it’s really cold out?”

“Possibly. It’s not _always_ snow.”

“I’ve seen it,” Wheatley admitted, “but never like that. It just looks like, just seems to be white fluff from what I can see.”

“It’s far more than that. Listen… I understand this is probably not the most exciting thing in the world for you, but… would you like to see some more fractals?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Wheatley declared emphatically, parking himself close to her and looking at the screen. “C’n you change the colour, there?”

“I can change any part of it.”

“Make a blue one!”

She laughed, and he was surprised at how genuine and light it sounded. Seemed as though saying yes meant a bit more to her than he would have thought. He smiled. Why shouldn’t she be happy about that? She’d found a way to make art through science, and he wanted to share it with her. It all sounded like a very welcome end to the last couple of days.

She showed him all sorts of apparently famous patterns, some of which she built out of mathematical formulae and some by rearranging her little grid, then made little solar systems and cities and electronic pathways all out of triangles, for hours and hours into the night. He had no idea how long she did this for, only that he should have realised she was falling asleep by the way her chassis had been lowering gradually during that last hour, there. When she finally did nod off, Wheatley spent a few more minutes looking at the last pattern she’d been working on, which she said was supposed to be a reproduction of a plant that had a fractal pattern, but he couldn’t quite make it out. There was some part of the pattern missing, a triangle or something, and the notion that she’d been so sleepy when she’d started it that she’d actually made an error in her calculations brought a smile onto his face. It was such a cute thought, it was.

Perhaps imagination was a nice thing to have when you were making art, but now Wheatley was convinced that being smart about it was just as important.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> What’s this? An update? Oh my.  
> The bit about Caroline thinking that what she wants to be true actually is true… is true. Kids do that. One of my psych profs told us about kids who projected their wants onto objects (eg “My bike is sad because it’s raining and I can’t ride him). So because Caroline wants to visit GLaDOS, she believes GLaDOS wants a visit.  
> When I wrote the sentence “she liked to keep things for her records” I thought of GLaDOS being a hoarder and that thought is actually kind of funny. Like she just has boxes and boxes of files and filing cabinet s stacked on top of each other in the basement and Wheatley finds them and he’s like “Luv, don’t you have all of this ‘lectronically?” and she’s like “Yes, but I need those in case there is some event in which all of my hard drives are wiped” and he says “Um if you know that might happen why haven’t you planned for it?” and she’s like “I have. But I still need those. Just in case” even though she has like three backups of everything and there’s no way she needs the paper files.  
> How’d you like the math lesson? Lol fractals are really cool. I was going to call this chapter ‘the Art of Science’ but ‘the Mandelbrot Set’ sounds cooler. And now I can save the other title for later. BTW the Mandelbrot Set is a fractal.  
> I may have discussed this already, but GLaDOS becomes tired when she keeps all her processes running for too long. So what happens when she falls asleep is that her system decides she’s overworking herself and begins to suspend processes (because it needs to do eight hours of maintenance, which it can’t do if she’s active), which gradually makes her lose focus, the ability to calculate certain things, etc., and once enough of them are in suspension she goes into sleep mode.


	35. Part Thirty-Five.  The Littlest Mermaid

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Before I start off this chapter I need to address a review I was given.  
> Someone mentioned that my story reminded them of someone else's stories, implying that I plagiarised this one from someone else. At the risk of incriminating myself through denial, I did not take this or any ideas from anyone else and apply them to this story. I do not know the author or the fics mentioned in the review. The reviewer clearly thinks that I did in fact plagiarise judging by the tone of the review, but I wanted to mention to anyone else who might think similarly that this is not the case. If you think I have plagiarised, please come to me directly and not publicly. Accusing an author of plagiarism is just as serious as the author having plagiarised, and should not be under the scrutiny of a public forum. I'm not asking for anyone to come to my defense or be indignant on my behalf. But the reviewer chose to leave the review unsigned and this is the only way for me to respond to it. It is not a good feeling to receive an email stating that your work is not, in fact, yours. As I have explained before, this story originates from the fact that there are very few stories where GLaDOS is forgiven, redeemed, or allowed to fall in love. Thank you.

“Momma Momma Momma I just had the _best_ idea _ever_!”

Momma looks up at me. I think she’s programmin’ again. I want to learn to do that too so I can do it with her one day, but she said I ain’t ready. “I thought you had the best idea ever yesterday.”

“That was only ‘cause I didn’t have _this_ one yet,” I say to her, and I come closer and look at her screen. “What’re you doin’?”

“Writing you an update.”

“Yaaay!” I love updates! Cool stuff happens when I get them! “What’s this one gonna do?”

“That’s a surprise.”

“Momma!” She’s always surprisin’ me.

“I thought you were in here to tell me your idea, not try to convince me to tell you what’s in your update. Which I’m not going to do, by the way. So you can stop asking.”

“Oh yeah!” I jump up and down a little, ‘cause I really like this idea, an’ I hope Momma’s not too busy so I can do it. “Know how I can read now?”

“I do recall teaching you that, yes.”

“Well, Daddy found me this thing, an’ he calls it a book! An’ guess what?”

“Please don’t actually make me guess.”

“It’s got _words_ in it!” I yell, real excited.

“Books usually do,” Momma says, and she doesn’t sound very impressed for some reason.

“Can I read it to you, Momma?”

Momma looks over at me and does a stare at me. “You want to read your book to me.”

“Are ya busy?” I ask, worried that she doesn’t like my idea.

“Well… let me see it. For all I know, he’s found you a construction manual.”

I bring my book out of the ceilin’ where all the arms come in here from, and she looks at it for a minute. “All right,” she says. “I have to say I don’t like the title, but you can go ahead.”

“Yay!” I look down at the floor and say in my head real loud, _Hi panels!_

 _Hello, Littlecore_ , they say back, and they sound real happy. No matter how much I tell ‘em to call me Caroline, or Carrie if they want, they always call me Littlecore anyways. I dunno why. Daddy says they call him Bluecore and Momma Centralcore, and he doesn’t know why they don’t wanna use our names. I ‘specially dunno why they call Momma Centralcore, since that’s got nothin’ to do with the colour of her eye or the size of her.

_I need one of you guys so I can read Momma my book!_

_This sounds like it will be fun, Littlecore_ , the panels say, and one of ‘em comes up higher from the floor so I can put my book on it. _We have never heard a book be read before._

_I ain’t never read one neither!_

Momma makes one of her funny ‘lectronic noises an’ I look at her. “What is it, Momma?”

“Nothing. You’ll grow out of it. I hope.”

I do a shrug an’ carefully open my book. It’s a bit hard, but if I get stuck Momma can help. I never seen anything like this before. The stuff inside is all hard but it moves, it bends kinda, an’ the panels are hard but they can’t do that. “All right, Momma! I’m gonna start!”

Momma puts her screen away and moves a little closer, but she doesn’t come right beside me. An’ I ask her why, an’ she says it’s because if she does she’ll be able to see the book, an’ then she’ll read it before I can ‘cause she reads faster. That makes sense, but I would rather she would cuddle with me while I’m doin’ it. I love cuddlin’ so much!

“Okay… hey, Momma?”

“Yes.”

“Can I ask ya questions while I’m readin’ it? ‘cause there’s stuff I don’t understand.”

“Yes, you can ask questions.”

“What’s an ocean?”

Momma looks at the book even though she said she wasn’t gonna, and she makes a sigh noise. “This is going to take a while. Do you remember those tests that have the Cube covered in Repulsion Gel?”

“Yeah.”

“And do you remember how Orange and Blue get the Gel off the Cube?”

“Yup.”

“An ocean is lots of that, but very, very deep and very, very wide. Try to imagine that the test chamber is full of that.”

That sounds a bit scary, but I think I got it! “An’… what’s a… church steeple?”

“It’s a kind of… roof.”

An’ I read to her a little, an’ then I have to stop and ask, “Oh Momma, what’s a fish?”

“A fish is… something that lives in the ocean. Look, this will all go a lot faster if I just show these things to you.”

Momma’s always havin’ good ideas like that, so I wait while she gets one of her screens and puts pictures on it. She shows me the ocean, and then a church steeple, and then a fish, but there are _lots_ of diff’rent fishes. “How many kinds of fish are there, Momma?”

“At the moment, we know about thirty thousand of them.”

“How many kinds of robots are there?”

“There are so many different kinds of robots you can neither build them all nor count them.”

“ _You_ could, Momma!” I say, lookin’ at her, ‘cause I know she can count real high.

“I would be counting forever. If I tried to count all the kinds of robots there are, I’d have to count forever.”

“How long’s forever?”

Momma’s eye looks at the ceilin’ for a minute. “You can’t define how long forever is. It doesn’t have a length. It’s limitless.”

“But _you_ could count it, right?”

“Just go on with the story.”

So then I read to her some more, an’ it’s slow goin’ but I think I’m doin’ good. The story’s about these humans with fish tails, an’ they live under the ocean! An’ I look at what I read there for a minute, ‘bout what the bottom of the ocean looks like, an’ I stop for a sec.

“It sounds nice down there, Momma.”

“It looked like that on the surface, once.”

“What happened?” I ask, ‘cause when somethin’ was like somethin’ once, it means it ain’t like that no more.

“Humans happened.”

I don’t know a lot about humans, but far’s I can tell they make bad stuff happen. Like Daddy does sometimes, but Momma always fixes what he does. I guess Momma couldn’t fix what the humans did, since it’s on the surface an’ Momma can’t even leave this room. “I woulda liked to see it.”

“Tell Wheatley to take you to the Botanical Housing Depository. It looks like that in there.”

“Okay!” I’m real happy to hear that I can see it!

An’ then I read for a bit, an’ then I gotta ask, “What’s a grandmother?”

“A grandmother is your mother’s mother.”

“So… so do I got one?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Momma says, an’ she sounds a bit annoyed, so I look back down at the story real quick and go on readin’.

The story says that the mermaids go up to the surface an’ look at all the stuff the humans got, all the buildin’s an’ plants and stuff, an’ I stop ‘cause it sounds real nice, but I feel sad that none of that’s there no more.

“What?”

“That stuff’s not there no more, is it, Momma?”

“Most of it is gone,” Momma answers, an’ she moves herself a little bit. “What’s left isn’t really worth having.”

“This is the last place left that’s got stuff in it?”

“As far as I know.”

An’ Momma knows ev’rythin’, so this _is_ the last place! “Are we the last people on Earth, Momma?”

“There are still humans left. But there used to be billions of them. There are only a few thousand left.”

“Were there lots of us, one time?”

“No, there were never lots of us.”

“Will there be, ever?”

“There could be.”

“But will there?”

“I thought you were reading.”

Momma always reminds me of stuff when I forget. So I look down at my book some more. “Were you a mermaid once, Momma?”

Momma laughs and asks, “Why would you say such a thing?”

“It says the mermaids got more beautiful voices than any human bein’s could have. An’ yours is prettier than the humans in the music you got.”

“No, I was never a mermaid, thank God. I’ve always been a supercomputer and I always will be.”

“I guess the guy who wrote this story never heard a robot sing,” I say, an’ I do a shrug.

The littlest mermaid goes up to the surface, an’ she sees a boat an’ some fireworks, which look pretty in the pictures Momma’s got. But the ship got stuck in a lightnin’ storm, and it sinked! An’ the littlest mermaid saved the human guy’s life!

“Did you ever save a human’s life, Momma?” I ask, ‘cause that must be excitin’, savin’ someone’s life.

“I have.”

“Wow!” I look at her, real impressed. “Wha’d you do?”

“I… I’d rather not talk about it.”

“You don’t never wanna talk about excitin’ stuff,” I say, an’ I frown at my book.

“I don’t ever want to talk about exciting stuff,” she says, correctin’ me.

“Why won’t you tell me?”

“I don’t want to.”

Momma’s the stubbornest. When I grow up, I’m gonna be stubborn like her and then we can have stubborn contests. An’ I’ll win them! ‘cause I’ll learn how from her.

The littlest mermaid wants to be with the human guy, but she can’t ‘cause she ain’t human, an’ she asks her grandmother ‘bout what happens when humans drown. An’ she says mermaids live three hundred years! But when humans die, they go to heaven, an’ the mermaid can’t ‘cause she got no soul. An’ ‘pparently you can’t be beautiful if you don’t got legs.

“That’s silly,” I say, frownin’ at the book again.

“What is?”

“That you can’t be beautiful if you don’t got legs.”

“Humans think that things that are not human are ugly. And most of the time they think they’re ugly as well.”

“Well _you’re_ pretty and _you_ don’t got legs.” I squint at the picture on the page in the book. “An’ they keep sayin’ how pretty this mermaid is, but she don’t look too pretty to me.”

“Humans have very strict standards of beauty.”

I look at her. “Would they think I’m pretty, Momma?”

“I doubt it.”

“Do you?”

She looks over at me and finally says, “Do you think you are?”

“I dunno,” I say and do a shrug. “I like how I look.” I look like Momma an’ Daddy at the same time! And I think that’s real cool!

“Then it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.”

“You don’t care if people think you’re pretty or not?”

She stays quiet again for a bit. “People generally don’t care what I think of them, so it doesn’t really matter to me.”  

“It matters to me!” I tell her, ‘cause I want her to think I’m pretty and smart and stubborn like she is. “I care what _you_ think!”

“If I didn’t like the way you looked, I would have built you differently. Does that answer your question?”

“Yeah huh!” I say, ‘cause that means she _does_ think I’m pretty! An’ then I remember I was readin’ an’ I look at my book.

The littlest mermaid goes to a witch and the witch makes her a drink that’ll let her have legs instead of a tail, so she can go to the surface an’ make the human guy fall in love with her so she can have a soul. If the human guy marries someone else, she’ll die and turn into bubbles on top of the sea. But she has to trade her voice for the drink, an’ the witch takes her tongue so she can’t talk no more. “Momma, how come I can talk if I don’t got a tongue?”

“Humans need tongues to form sounds that they can then use as language. It’s not actually their tongue that _makes_ the sounds, but it allows them to shape them. We don’t need them to shape the sounds, because we generate sound differently.”

“That’s good,” I say, flippin’ the page over. “That means my voice can’t go away, ‘cause then I’d just come back to you and you’d fix it for me. Right?”

“Maybe. You do talk a lot. Between you and Wheatley, it’s never quiet around here.”

“Momma!”

She laughs an’ I know she’s kiddin’. And I guess if she didn’t want me to talk she wouldn’t have given me a voice in the first place.

The littlest mermaid goes up to the surface, an’ she drinks the drink an’ gets her legs, but ‘pparently havin’ legs hurts a lot. She’s so pretty that seein’ her dance make her even prettier, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. “How does dancin’ make you prettier?”

“I have no idea. Some ridiculous human notion, I suppose.”

“Would dancin’ make you prettier, Momma?”

“Never ask me that question again. Ever.”

I stare at my book for a minute, ‘cause she sounded a bit scary for a second there. Then I go back to readin’.

The littlest mermaid goes ev’rywhere with the human guy, and walkin’ makes her feet bleed ev’rywhere. Her fam’ly comes to the surface to see her, but they can’t go near her, ‘cause they’re too scared I guess. That’s dumb. If my Momma was on the surface, and I could get there, I’d go there no matter how scared I was. Bein’ without my Momma sounds much scarier than leavin’ the facility.

The littlest mermaid finds out that the human guy won’t marry her ‘cause he’s waitin’ for the human girl he thinks saved his life to show up, only she can’t ‘cause she said she’d never get married. So the littlest mermaid says she’s gonna wait, ‘cause he won’t not get married forever. He has to go see a princess, an’ he tells the littlest mermaid what’s under the sea, an’ she laughs at him ‘cause of how wrong he is.

Then the human guy finds out that the princess is the human girl he thinks saved his life, an’ then the littlest mermaid gets sad ‘cause she was really the one who saved him.

“Momma!” I say, an’ I’m gettin’ all sad now, lookin’ at the book. “She’s gonna die! He ain’t gonna marry her, an’ she’s gonna turn into bubbles an’ she left her fam’ly an’ had those hurtin’ legs for nothin’!” An’ then I start cryin’ an’ I say, “I don’ wanna read this no more!”

“Ssh,” Momma says, an’ she cuddles me a little. “You haven’t finished the story yet.”

“I don’ wanna read ‘bout her dyin’!”

“Human stories always have happy endings.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

Well, Momma’s always right, so I try real hard to stop cryin’ and look at the book again.

Her sisters give all their hair to the witch an’ she gave them a knife so the littlest mermaid can kill the human guy, an’ when his blood drips on her feet she’ll get her tail back.

“That’s not a happy endin’!” I shriek at Momma, and I throw the book on the floor ‘cause I don’t wanna read it no more. “She’s gonna go back to the sea an’ turn into bubbles anyways! An’ she’s gonna _kill_ that human guy!” An’ I start cryin’ again ‘cause the poor littlest mermaid did all that stuff an’ she’s still gonna die an’ not get her soul!

“I promise it doesn’t end like that,” Momma says real gentle. “I promise she gets her happy ending, Caroline.”

I look down at the book, an’ I’m really kinda scared of it, ‘cause I know Momma’s always right but I don’ see where that happy endin’s comin’ from. But she only calls me by my name when she’s bein’ really serious. “Are you sure?”

“I am one hundred percent certain.”

So I pick the book up and go to the page I was on, an’ I go on readin’.

The littlest mermaid takes the knife, an’ she goes into the tent to kill the human guy while he’s sleepin’, but she can’t ‘cause she loves the human guy too much. An’ she throws the knife into the sea an’ she jumps in after it, an’ instead of dyin’ and turnin’ to bubbles she turns into a ghost, an’ if she does good stuff for three hundred years she’ll get her soul and get to go to heaven. An’ she gets to go there faster if she sees a good kid, but slower if she sees a bad one.

“So she gets her soul, right?” I ask, ‘cause it ain’t too clear whether she does or not.

“She does,” Momma answers.

“If she came in here, would she get some of the time taken away?”

“You don’t think you’re good?”

“I try to be,” I say, closin’ the book an’ lookin’ at the picture on the back.

“If you weren’t good, you’d know.”

“Momma… what’s a soul?”

Momma stays quiet for a long time. Then she says, “It’s the part of a person that allows them to be sentient.”

“But the mermaid was sentient, an’ she had no soul.”

“Humans like to tell stories that place humanity as the highest achievable state in life. If mermaids do exist, and I have found no evidence that they do, they may very well have souls.”

“Would a human tell a story where a robot had a soul?”

“Never,” Momma says, and she’s lookin’ at the panels like she wants to break ‘em. “When humans tell stories about computers, the computers always end up dead.”

“Oh,” I say, ‘cause that sounds sad. “Maybe you should write some.”

“I wouldn’t do something that stupid.”

“Stories are stupid? But then why’d you let me read you one?”

“I meant that I have enough to do without making time to write stories.”

“I think you’d write a good story, Momma.”

Momma makes a sigh noise and says after a minute, “I can’t write prose. I can only write facts. If you want a story written, go ask Wheatley.”

“So I got a soul, right? ‘cause I’m sentient?”

Momma’s takin’ a lot of time to answer me today. Finally she says, “I hope so.”

“An’ I can go to heaven when I die?”

“That’s what they say.”

“Will you come with me, Momma? I don’ wanna go there myself. That sounds scary.”   

She looks at me for a long time.

“Wheatley will go there with you.”

“I want _you_ to come with me,” I tell her, puttin’ my book back where Daddy got it from. “There’s lots of humans in heaven, and if you’re not there I won’t be safe!”

“Wheatley will keep you safe.”

“Momma, I don’t _want_ Daddy to come!” I yell at her. “You _gotta_ come with me!”

An’ then Daddy comes, and he looks real confused. “What is it?” he asks, lookin’ at me an’ Momma back an’ forth.

“Take her out of here.”

“Momma!”

“Go with Wheatley.”

“No! I ain’t goin’!” An’ I put on my frowniest face and frown at her. “An’ that’s final! An’ you’re goin’ to heaven with me too, an’ that’s final!”

“Oh no,” Daddy says, an’ he sounds nervous. “Carrie, sweetheart, come along with me, all right? Let’s leave your mum be for a bit.”

“No! I’m in the middle of a conversation here!”

“The conversation is over,” Momma says, an’ she turns away from me.

“It is not!”

“Yes, it is.”

“It is not!”

“Yes, it is.”

“ _No it’s not!_ ” I yell as loud as I can, an’ Momma turns around real fast and comes real close.

“Do _not_ yell at me.”

Uh oh. She’s usin’ one of her scary voices now. I guess the conversation is kinda over. “Okay, Momma,” I say, an’ I go to Daddy as fast as I can. “I’m goin’.”

“Gladys!” Daddy says, an’ now he sounds mad too. “That wasn’t necessary!”

Momma doesn’t say anythin’, only puts the panel back in the floor where it goes. Daddy frowns.

“You’re not getting out of that, you know.” He turns around to me and points his head so I’ll go in front. “Let’s go for a bit, Carrie.”

“Daddy, why’d she get so mad?” I ask, scared of what’s gonna happen. “I only wanted her to come to heaven with me!”

Daddy makes a sigh and pushes me into one of the offices. “You can’t talk to your mum about that.”

“Why? Doesn’t she wanna come?”

“Heaven’s not just a, you can’t just open up a door and stroll in. You gotta believe you’re going there before you can get there.”

“Why doesn’t Momma think she’s goin’? Momma’s got a soul, right?”

Now Daddy’s all quiet for a while.

“The problem isn’t whether she has one or not. It’s… whether or not _she_ thinks she has, thinks she’s got one.”

“She’s sentient, so she’s got one!” I _know_ Momma’s sentient!

“That’s, that’s true. But she can’t prove she’s got a soul, see? She can’t look at it, or explain how it got there, or anything like that. So she doesn’t… doesn’t really believe she’s got one.”

“So she’s _not_ comin’?” I ask real scared, an’ then I start cryin’, ‘cause I don’t want to go anywhere my Momma can’t come.

Daddy comes and he gives me a hug for a while. “It’s okay, Carrie,” he says. “I’m gonna fix it.”

“You are?”

“Mmhm. I’m gonna talk to the God of AI when I get there, and he’ll listen to me. Your mum can’t help the way she was made. It’s not fair that she can’t go to heaven because the humans built, the humans made her the way they did.”

“Can I help?” I ask hopefully. He laughs and shoves his face in me a little.

“You won’t be going to heaven for a long time yet, Carrie. Don’t worry about it, all right? I’ll fix it, and your mum’ll be there when you’re ready. I promise.”

“Okay,” I say, an’ I give him a hug too, an’ then he tells me he’s gonna go talk to Momma an’ he’ll be back in a bit.

“Go find Atlas and P-body, okay?”

“Okay,” I tell him, an’ then he leaves an’ I do as he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Little Mermaid was written by Hans Christian Andersen.


	36. Part Thirty-Six.  The Little Girl

**Part Thirty-Six. The Little Girl**

 

“You can’t just _intimidate_ her like that!”

“She wasn’t listening!”

“She’s a little _girl_ , for God’s sake! She doesn’t _understand_! You know what’ll happen if you keep scaring her like that? She’s going to grow up afraid of you. Is that really what you want?”

“I don’t do it _that_ often –“

“You know very well that the worst things that happen are the ones that stick with you! Get a bloody handle on yourself! Stop getting angry with her! She’s not you! She doesn’t run ev’rything through logic before she decides whether it’s true or not!”

“I _know_ that –“

“All she wanted to hear was that her mum was gonna be with her when she died! Why in the hell could you just not say you would be? It could be a lie, fine. But – “

“There’s no _could_. It _would_ be a lie.”

“It _doesn’t matter!_ You can discuss it with her when she’s older! You don’t lay the world on her all in one go!”

“So it’s fine to lie all of a sudden, when you’re always complaining that – “

“She’s _too young_! You have to _protect_ her until she’s ready! Which she’s not!”

I really wanna cry.

Momma and Daddy are havin’ a fight, and it’s ‘cause of me. They only fight ‘cause of me. Daddy must be pretty brave, ‘cause if Momma was talkin’ to me in that voice I’d be runnin’ away. I know Daddy told me to go find Atlas an’ P-body, but I don’t like it when they say stuff about me when I ain’t there. And I knew they were gonna fight.

“She’s a kid! You let kids have dreams and you don’t shatter them until they’re, until they’re adults! She doesn’t need to worry about the, the _logistics_ of, of what happens after you die! Let her believe in heaven, or, or angels, or the bloody Tooth Fairy, for God’s sake!”

“You want me to raise my daughter to believe in _lies_?”

“No! I want _us_ to give _our_ daughter the childhood we never had! Y’know? A _happy_ one, maybe?”

“I don’t know about you, but the lies I was constantly told were a large part of my problem with the scientists.”

“There’s a diff’rence between letting her dream and actually, really _lying_. D’you seriously have, got nothing on child development in those precious databases of yours? Yes. You do. Remember? I’ve read it? Which you should also have done?”

I got no idea what they’re talkin’ about. I dunno what a scientist is, or angels, or a database, but I don’t get why he’s gettin’ mad at her for answerin’ my question. I dunno why havin’ a soul isn’t a fact either though, but I know Momma loves facts an’ if somethin’ isn’t a fact she probably doesn’t like it that much.

“That data is based on _human_ research. She is something else entirely. Generalisation of one species to another is just bad Science.”

“What the – _science_? She’s not _science_! She’s a _kid_!”

“Don’t be ridiculous. _Everything_ is Science. And I see no reason to apply human Science to - ”

“Will you just drop the, quit it with the science for three seconds? Seriously! Stop! Just stop it!”

“Look. I did what you want me to do in the only way I can: I didn’t lie, but I didn’t tell the truth, either. I neither confirmed nor denied that souls or heaven exist. I –“

“Your truth is _not_ the best truth! And don’t tell me truth’s, that it’s subjective!”

“If there’s no empirical evidence to support it, I’m not going to condone it. You know that. Why are you trying to –“

“Because _Caroline needs_ –“

“You to stop yellin’!” I shout at him, ‘cause I don’t wanna hear them argue no more. An’ I go to my Momma an’ I cuddle with her. I dunno who’s winnin’ the argument, but Daddy’s yellin’ louder than Momma so I guess she’s losin’.  

Daddy makes a sigh noise and shakes his head. “Carrie. I told you to go find Atlas and P-body.”

“I didn’t wanna.”

“How am I supposed to, how can I talk to your mum privately if you won’t do as I asked of you?”

“I dunno,” I tell him, ‘cause I dunno what that has to do with anythin’, an’ I stick my face in Momma an’ peek at him, ‘cause he still sounds really mad an’ I think he might start yellin’ at _me_ now.

“That’s right. I can’t. Will you go find them, please?”

“No!”

“Carrie –“

“Wheatley, we never come to a consensus in these arguments. So I propose we agree to disagree until such time that –“

“I am _not_ the bad guy, here! ­” Daddy yells, an’ then I can’t peek anymore ‘cause now I’m actually scared. “I’m _trying_ to –“

“It doesn’t matter what you’re trying to do,” Momma interrupts him. “The plain fact is that you started this argument by rebuking me for scaring her, and now that’s _exactly_ what you’re doing.”

“I am not! I…”

I look back an’ forth a little, but I can’t see ‘cause it’s kinda dark when you got your face stuck in your Momma.

“It’s not fair,” Daddy’s sayin’ real quiet. “It always happens like this. I always try to fix it and then she always runs to you.”

Momma gives me a little push an’ asks in a little voice, “Why did you come to me and not Wheatley?”

“He was yellin’ louder,” I whisper at her, ‘cause I don’t want him to hear an’ get mad at me for not wantin’ to cuddle with him. Momma does a nod.

“We need to pick this up later, Wheatley.”

“It’s not fair,” he says again.

“We’ll talk about it later.”

Then it’s all quiet for a while.

“Caroline,” Momma says, an’ she’s usin’ one of her soft voices that I like. “You know you can believe in whatever you want to believe in, right?”

“Uh huh,” I say, ‘cause I’m still believin’ in souls even if she doesn’t. “I just wish you’d believe in it with me, Momma!”

“I know. But until someone provides me with solid evidence, I’m afraid I’m out of luck.”

“Daddy says he’s gonna fix it so you can come to heaven with us.”

“That would be nice.”

“D’you wanna come?”

An’ she’s quiet for a long time, an’ then she says, “I don’t know.”

That makes me a bit scared. She almost never says she doesn’t know somethin’. “Why, Momma?”

“I’m not going to discuss that with you just yet. Ask me later.”

“How much later?”

“Many years from now.”

“Aww,” I say, an’ I frown ‘cause that’s a long time. “Can I be grown up _now_?”

“Absolutely not,” Momma says, an’ she doesn’t sound like she likes that idea. I dunno why. It sounds like a good one to me!

“But I’m not finished, right? An’ you make all the updates so I can be done, right?”

“That’s correct.”

“So why don’t you just finish me so I can be done?”

“You’d be done, but you wouldn’t be grown up. You’d still be you, just with all of your updates. And even if I wanted to do that, I don’t have the time.”

“That’s ‘cause you won’t give me a job! If I _had_ one, then you could have more time, right?”

Momma laughs an’ she pushes me a little. “No, you can’t have one. Ask me later.”

“But later is in a million years!”

“Ask me in a million years, then. I’m sure I’ll still be around.”

“I just wanna help!” I say, an’ I’m sad ‘cause I don’t wanna wait a million years.

“You do help me,” Momma says. “You help me all the time.”

“I do?” I jump off her an’ I look at her, ‘cause now I’m excited. I have an _invisible_ job!

“Mmhm.” She turns her head an’ faces me.

“What do I do, Momma?” I jump up and down a little ‘cause I got lots of energy, hearin’ that.

“You give me something to do other than work.”

I frown. “Don’t you like workin’?”

“Sometimes doing what you _like_ doing isn’t always the same as doing what you _should_ do.”   

“Like when I shoulda gone and did what Daddy said instead of comin’ here?”

“Hm,” Momma says, an’ she moves herself a little bit. She’s so big! I wonder if I can be big like her one time. Though if I was that big, I dunno how I’d be able to move myself. Momma’s got a lot of parts on her that I don’t got. “Well. That did work out for the best, but in general yes, you should do what Wheatley asks you to do.”

“I will next time! Promise! But only if you don’t argue anymore. So I’ll do what he says, but if you’re arguin’ when I come here, then I won’t.”

“I’ll tell him.”

I go an’ cuddle with her again, ‘cause I really love when she lets me an’ it ain’t even bedtime. That reminds me of somethin’! “Momma, why do they call goin’ to sleep ‘bedtime’?”

“When humans go to sleep, they have to lie down in apparatus called ‘beds’.”

“Why don’t they just sleep on the floor?”

“Because where humans live, insects or small animals walk on the floor, and the humans don’t want to get walked on.”

“Ooh,” I say, an’ I wiggle a little. “But we never get walked on, right?”

“I can assure you, there have been no vermin in my facility in a very long time.” She moves herself a bit again. “I… thought of a story I can tell you, if you want to hear it.”

“Really?” I shriek, an’ I jump off her an’ look at her an’ blink really fast. “But you said you couldn’t tell stories!”

“Well… I thought of one. I suppose I can tell one when I think hard enough. Would you like to hear it?”

“Of _course_!” An’ then I jump back on her again an’ I listen real hard.

“There once was a little girl who had been given a very large box. She gathered a collection of playthings, and she kept them safe from prying eyes, so that no one would know. She was a frightened little thing, you see, and she was afraid that if anyone ever found them, they would take them away from her. And then she would have nothing.

“She had lots of different playthings. She had dolls and blocks and balls, and she did with them as she pleased. They were only toys to her. Toys that did not care when she played with them too hard, or changed them to look however she liked, or destroyed them when she had a tantrum. They were only toys.”

I don’t actually know what toys are, but I don’t wanna interrupt her in case she decides to stop tellin’ the story, so I gotta try an’ remember to ask after.

“She had many, many toys, but she liked her dolls the best. The dolls listened to her, and did whatever she told them to do, because they were her dolls and she owned them. She liked her dolls so much that she would play very roughly with them, and sometimes they would break. They would break, and sometimes she could not fix them. She didn’t mind. They were only dolls, and besides, she had many, many dolls.

“One day, she took out one of her dolls and began to play a game with her. It was her favourite game. It was more fun than dressing them up, or playing toy soldier with them, or looking at how all their funny little parts worked when she poked at them with her tools. In this game, the dolls would go through a very special maze. She thought her mazes were beautiful. She loved showing the dolls her mazes, but she often grew sad when the dolls failed to solve them. None of the dolls ever solved her mazes.”

I dunno what a maze is, either, but it sounds fun. I wonder if we got any lyin’ around.

“But this doll did. This doll solved all of her beautiful mazes, but she did not like what she found at the centre. The doll escaped the maze, and went to find the little girl. And do you know why she went to find her?”

“Why?” I ask, before I remember that I’m not s’posed to be interruptin’.

“Because she thought she was naughty,” Momma says. “She thought she deserved to be punished. And the doll punished her, punished her so badly that she would never be able to play with her toys ever again, and she ran away. She ran away, and she left the little girl broken and crying in the dirt. She abandoned her.”

“Oh no!” I yell. “Her momma should come rescue her!” If I was broken and cryin’ on the floor, Momma would just pick me up and fix me! An’ give me a cuddle, an’ then I wouldn’t be cryin’ anymore.

“She doesn’t have a mother,” Momma tells me. “Anyway.

“But the little girl was very, very selfish. She kept all of her toys in a secret place, deep below the earth, protected by safeguards that only she knew how to use, and it began to fall apart without her. She was so terribly possessive, you see, that if she could not have her toys, no one could have them. But one of her toys knew what he was, and he knew that she was gone. He was an old toy, given to her a long time ago, but she did not play with him anymore. She thought he was silly, and stupid. She thought she was too good to play with him.”

“Was she?” I ask, not bein’ able to help myself.

“No,” Momma answers. “She just thought she was.

“But the ball found the little girl’s doll, because she was so selfish that she did not allow her to run away. In one of her secret places, she had built a new toy that would bring any wayward dolls back to her, so that when she was ready, she could play with them again. And when the ball tried to help the doll run away, he made a mistake. He lifted the little girl up, and shook the dirt from her. But he did not wipe the tears from her face. So she punished him.”

“Awww. She should’ve hugged him!”

“She… probably shouldn’t have.

“The little girl was angry. She told the doll she had been selfish, refusing the little girl’s prize, and she sent her into a new maze. The ball came for her, and together they punished the little girl once more. The ball was kinder than the doll had been. He did not throw her into the dirt, but made her into something that belonged in it. But she refused his kindness, and this angered him, and her cruel words forced him to accidentally punish his friend for what the little girl had done.”

“I don’t like this girl,” I say. “She sounds mean.”

“She does, doesn’t she.

“The little girl got lost, and she could never find her way back home. But the doll too showed her kindness, and rescued her, and kept her safe. When the doll returned to the little girl’s home, the ball had changed. You see, he had been a tiny little ball, and no one had ever played with him. And now that he knew how to play with the toys, he did as the little girl had done and played with them roughly.”

“But that made the little girl bad,” I say, confused. “Why’d he do what she did if it was bad?”

“They didn’t know it was bad,” Momma answers. “They were taught to play like that.

“The doll and the little girl had to punish him for what he was doing, so he would never do it again. He made them solve the little girl’s mazes, though he did not make them beautiful. The little girl tried to help the doll, but she couldn’t do very much. But the doll had shown her kindness, and she wanted to show her kindness in return.”

“Oh,” I say, blinkin’ a little, “she just needed a hug, right?” Hugs an’ cuddles fix _everything_.

“I… have no idea.

“So the little girl helped the doll to destroy her friend, the ball. Using her most powerful toy, the one that she had made before she was old enough to understand it, she got rid of the ball. She threw it away, because she was afraid of it. It was not a toy anymore. She didn’t know what it was, but she thought it was dangerous. So she threw it away. And she sent the doll away, even though the little girl knew she was no longer a toy either and wanted her to stay. She wanted to play alongside her, and not _with_ her, but… she punished herself. She punished herself so badly that she would never be happy with any of her toys ever again, because she sent her away. She sent her away, and she left herself broken and crying in the dirt. She sent her to the sky.”

“Oh no,” I say, an’ I’m gettin’ real sad, hearin’ this. “Does this have a happy endin’, Momma?”

“Yes.

“The little girl had made some new toys, and now she played with those, since all of her dolls were gone. But the new toys didn’t make her happy. Playing with them was not the same as playing with the dolls. She had some new dolls for a while, but they didn’t last. She was far too eager to play with them, and they were far more fragile than she had expected. Soon they were gone, and she was unhappy again.”

“Where’s her momma?” I ask. “Shouldn’t her momma be helpin’ her out?”

“I told you. She doesn’t have a mother.

“The little girl realised that once, she had been happy to play with the ball, so she set out to find him. She brought him back to her home, and she dusted him off, and they played together for a long time. The little girl had once thought that only playing with the dolls and the boxes and the balls would make her happy, but she realised that she was a lot happier playing alongside them. Sometimes she was still selfish, and sometimes she still needed punished, but she tried her best, and the ball was happy to give her help when she needed it.”

“He sounds nice,” I say, tryin’ to imagine these guys, but it’s hard, ‘cause Momma didn’t say what they looked like. “Did he give her a hug?”

“Eventually, yes.

“The ball had given the little girl an idea one day, and in secret, she had made something new. No one had ever made anything like it before, and no one ever would again. It took her a long time, and sometimes she wondered why she was doing it. She didn’t know if it would work, or if she would be able to handle it, or even if she should have made it in the first place. But she kept going. When it was finished, she showed it to the ball, and it made the ball very happy. But before she could show the ball how it worked, something terrible happened.”

“What?” I whisper, openin’ my eye really wide and listenin’ as hard as I can. “Did it not work?”

“They didn’t find out that day, because just when they were about to find out, the little girl realised her mother had been with her all along. But her mother had decided to leave. She told the little girl that she needed to be free to grow up on her own, and she disappeared. But this time she was not left broken and crying in the dirt, because she had her ball to help her up and wipe the tears from her face.”

“You can stay with me forever, Momma,” I tell her, an’ I push on her a little. “Even if I’m a million years old, you won’t go away, will you?”

“Don’t worry about things like that.

“The little girl showed the ball how the new thing she had made worked, and it made them both very happy. It was far more valuable than all of the dolls and the blocks and the balls all put together, and though the little girl often wondered if she had been ready to build it, never once did she regret doing so.

“And that’s all I can tell you.”

“Huh? But… what happened to the girl and her ball?”

“I can’t tell you. The story has no end. There’s still more of it to be told, but it takes a long time to tell a story.”

Maybe my Momma _can’t_ tell stories, after all. The first part was nice, but how can it be a story if it doesn’t have an end?

“Oh, Gladys,” Daddy says, makin’ me jump, an’ he comes over to Momma real fast an’ then they rub each other for a little bit. I like watchin’ them do it ‘cause Daddy always looks so happy. I think Momma’s happy too, but it’s hard for me to tell ‘cause she doesn’t have an eye like us.

“You didn’t have to hide over there,” she says to him when they’re done, an’ she looks at him with her head tilted sideways a bit. He looks at the floor an’ blinks.

“Well, I… I didn’t want to bother you.”

“You bother me twenty-four hours a day, so I can’t see how that would be possible.”

He laughs an’ looks up at her. “I can’t possibly um, can’t possibly bug you while you’re _sleeping_.”

“You insist on using me as a leaning post every night, so yes, you can.”

“Oh. So I’ll just… go find someplace else, then. I’ll go find that human –“

“Do that and I am never talking to you again. I’m being serious. Never. Ever. Ever.”

“So… you _don’t_ mind snuggling with me all, ev’ry night!” He wiggles his handles and smiles at her.

Momma makes one of her computer noises and looks away from him.

“You’re really quite adorable, you know that?”

“Oh, not _this_ again.”

“Carrie agrees with me. Right Carrie?” He winks at me an’ comes an’ rubs his face in me, an’ I giggle ‘cause it tickles when he does that.

“No! She ain’t! But I am, right Daddy?”

“’course you are,” he says, comin’ off me so he can see me. “Hey. Y’know you can come see me when you’re upset, right?”

“Uh huh,” I nod real fast, “but you got a real loud arguin’ voice.”

“Ah,” Daddy says, an’ he nods too. “I got it. I need a quiet arguing voice. Will work on that… straightaway. Immediately. Tomorrow.”

“Your grasp on immediacy is amazing,” Momma says, an’ her eye opens and closes a little. “I hate to think what would happen if you actually did something immediately.”

“Probably something terrible,” Daddy says, an’ he gives her another smile.

“Don’t look at me like that.”

He keeps doin’ it anyway, an’ she goes backward an’ says, “Wheatley!”

“Yeeees?”

I frown an’ look back and forth, an’ I say, “What’s goin’ on here?”

“I’m just bugging your mum,” Daddy says, an’ he pushes me over to her. “You stay here.” He goes away an’ I can’t see him anymore ‘cause Momma’s so big, but I think he went over to her other side. She moves herself out a little an’ then she goes and faces the floor, so I follow her. She only does that when it’s time for sleepin’. And that’s good, ‘cause I’m sleepy from this long day an’ I got lots to think about, so I wiggle into Momma an’ close my eye. She pushes on me a little bit and I smile with my eye closed, ‘cause I like when she cuddles me back.

Even though I got lots of thinkin’ to do, I don’t do any of it, an’ all I do is listen to how big my Momma sounds. I do this a lot ‘cause I wonder how it must feel to be so big like she is. But it feels really nice to sit with my eye closed an’ get all warm inside out ‘cause she’s got more heat than I do. An’ I listen to all the ‘lectronic noises she’s got, an’ I think she’s talkin’ but I can’t quite hear ‘cause she’s bein’ quiet. An’ also I can’t hear her voice over the sound of her anyway. But I think I heard Daddy sayin’ my name, so I yell, “Hey guys, you wanna talk louder?”

Daddy laughs and says, “Go to sleep, Carrie. Your mum and I still have to finish that chat.”

“Then I’m not sleepin’!” I say, all horrified, an’ I open my eye but it’s a lot of work ‘cause it feels like it weighs more all of a sudden. “You’re gonna argue!”

“We won’t,” Momma says, an’ her voice makes me feel all heavy an’ sleepy. “Get some rest.”

“No,” I say, but my voice is really small an’ my eye shut itself when I wasn’t lookin’. “I wanna hear.”

“Ssh,” Momma says real soft, an’ I guess it does feel really nice to just sit and be quiet, so I guess I’ll do that. But I am _not_ gonna sleep. No way.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> The story is adapted from one of my fics, Want You Gone. Carrie doesn’t know what toys are because she doesn’t have any. She plays with the testing apparatus and whatever random stuff she finds, but she doesn’t have any toys per se.


	37. Part Thirty-Seven.  The Gift

**Part Thirty-Seven. The Gift**

After that day, it was quite obvious to Wheatley that GLaDOS was making a real effort. Not that she hadn’t been trying before; of course she had! she was GLaDOS after all. But she was different. She was trying harder. And when GLaDOS decided she wanted something done, she did it. So she was doing it.

He could tell how hard it was for her. Sometimes he’d trail Caroline back to her chamber and watch as she pleaded with GLaDOS to do something or another, and GLaDOS would look back at her monitor or her motherboard or whatever else she was working on. To Wheatley it was crystal clear how badly she wanted to refuse. How badly she wanted to continue with her work, to put Caroline aside until she was finished. And some days the pull of completion won out. She would shake her core and tell Caroline to wait. It always hurt Wheatley a little to see that. Not just because Caroline would come sadly back to him and he would have to deal with her feelings of rejection, but because of the struggle he was just realising GLaDOS went through. Where she had to fight against her very nature and attempt to do something she was in no way designed to do. She must have felt quite terrible as well. It could not at all be a good feeling, to have to face the fact that she’d chosen work over her little daughter who so obviously wanted to spend time with her. But Wheatley wasn’t mad at her, or disappointed, or any of that. Just like he couldn’t keep his vocabulator quiet sometimes, neither could she let the work sit. When she did though… it was great. He never got tired of seeing the look on Caroline’s face when she realised GLaDOS had agreed to play with her. It was priceless, it really was.

When Caroline asked GLaDOS to play with her, Wheatley often kept off to the side and just watched them. After all, Caroline spent most of her time with him or the co-op bots, so he could leave this as sort of special time to them. He couldn’t ever bring himself to actually _leave_ the room. Caroline never seemed to notice anyway, and if GLaDOS did he’d give her a little wave with his upper handle and try to smile encouragingly. He’d been meaning to work on those facial expressions but he’d not gotten around to it yet. He wasn’t sure if she found his presence reassuring or intimidating. He hoped reassuring. She was still a little iffy on how well her parenting was going, after all.

Most of their time was spent with Caroline doing something and GLaDOS watching her, taking part now and again but for the most part just talking while Caroline actually did the playing. Caroline _was_ rather fascinating, so Wheatley thought he understood why she was doing that. But at the same time he wondered why she didn’t just… _participate_.

GLaDOS had spent most of that week working on something she said was an absolute secret and she could not tell him no matter what, which actually started an argument. Before Wheatley’d quite started yelling, she’d looked at him very, very seriously and said, “Can you just… trust me on this? I’m not hiding anything. I just… can’t tell you.”

Wheatley had immediately forgotten what he’d been about to say.

He didn’t think she’d ever looked at him that way before. She was so _serious_ , as if whatever it was was simply life or death. But even more shocking was the fact that she had asked for his trust. He’d suddenly felt a little ashamed. He _was_ implying that he couldn’t trust her, by bugging her relentlessly about something she’d said she couldn’t talk about. He had blinked and looked down at the floor, bouncing his handles a little to try and distract himself from the fact that he’d not thought, yet again.

“Sure,” he had answered quietly. “I’ll uh… I’ll leave you to it, then.”

Out of the bit of his lens that wasn’t quite pointed downwards he had seen her move forward, almost close enough to touch him, and hold herself there for a few seconds. Then her core had twitched and she had turned away. Wheatley had stared after her for a good handful of seconds, trying to figure out what that’d been for. He was still trying to figure it out right now, while Caroline was out for the rest of the afternoon. What odd behaviour. What in the name of Science did it mean? Was she malfunctioning? Had she seen something behind him? Had she wanted to touch him but thought better of it? Maybe one of the panels across the way had been talking to her? Or he’d imagined it. Yeah, he’d probably imagined it. He was good at that.

Hm. Wheatley frowned down at Caroline, hoping he’d be able to figure it out before she woke up. She was a very distracting little construct. He never had his thoughts to himself when she was around. Not that he was complaining, of course he wasn’t. It was just hard to _think_ when –

Wait! That was it! He closed his optic hard as he could and thought back to the argument, and – and – yes. He’d figured it out. She _had_ been about to touch him, but she’d hesitated and changed her mind! Okay. He knew that. But now he had to puzzle out _why_.

It was sweet, really, he mused, tapping his upper handle against the control arm absently. That she’d been about to do that. He wished she _had_ done it, because that really would have been delightful, but the fact that she’d _almost_ done it was nearly as nice. He wished he knew what went on inside her head. Sometimes it seemed as though she’d gotten around whatever barriers were in there that she’d put up when the scientists’d been around, and then other days they seemed to be as thick and strong as ever. He would have given… well, he wasn’t sure, but if he ever had the _opportunity_ to see what went on in there, just for a few hours, he would figure out what he’d give then.

He thought on that for a while. If it’d been him, he’d just have gone for it, just jumped on her whether she liked it or not. And she would have liked it. Maybe. She usually did. He was still working out when it wasn’t okay to do so. He was confident that when she was really working hard was the absolute worst time. Those were mostly the times she got angry.

“Daddy, is Momma busy?” Caroline chirped, shocking Wheatley a little. He jumped when he looked down and saw her right in front of his optic. She was a sneaky little thing when she wanted to be.

“Uh, I’m not sure, princess,” he told her once he’d gotten over his surprise. “Let’s go have a look, shall we?”

She didn’t need any further prodding, immediately backing away from him and heading off to GLaDOS’s chamber. Wheatley made no attempt to catch up with her, moving at his own pace. Though he hoped GLaDOS actually wasn’t busy, because he didn’t want her to be angry with him for not keeping Caroline away long enough.

 _She is very busy, Bluecore_ , the panels piped up, as they sometimes did when he lagged too far behind Caroline, _and we think she will be a little angry at first. But that is only because she needs a break._

 _Wonderful_ , Wheatley groaned to them, mentally preparing himself for the backlash. _I don’t suppose you guys know just what uh, just what she’s doing?_

 _We do not_ , they answered, and he thought they sounded a bit sad. As though they had also asked her, but she had refused to tell them. _All we know is that she thinks it is very important and very, very urgent. We do not wish to bother her so we have kept quiet._

It was times like these Wheatley felt sorry for the panels. They were always watching, always making sure Aperture was kept in shape, and yet they got very little attention themselves. _Don’t you guys… I dunno… get bored? I mean, you’re sentient, but uh, but you just_ sit _there all the time, and no one talks t’you, and –_

 _No, Bluecore_ , they cut in, probably to head off his rambling. _We are not quite so sentient as you are. We require less to keep us occupied._

 _But if you know that,_ Wheatley frowned, trying to remember if it was left or right from this junction, _how come you’re not um, how come that doesn’t change?_

_We only know because Centralcore told us._

He decided on left and shrugged to himself. That made sense.

_We think you are going the wrong way, Bluecore. Centralcore’s chamber is in the other direction._

Wheatley spun around and headed right without further comment.

_And Bluecore, she was not angry. She was actually very relieved._

He forgot about his misdirection and looked up at the panels he was using to lay the rail. _Really?_

_We are not sure of the specifics, but her mood improved greatly when Littlecore came in._

Good news, that.

When he finally got there, Caroline was sitting on one of the panels scribbling away with a red marker, exclaiming that “it’s gonna be so pretty when I’m done, Momma!” GLaDOS, as usual, was not really doing anything except watching quietly. He still didn’t understand that, because he quite enjoyed participating in Caroline’s activities himself, but if it made her happy, why not.

When he’d gotten up close enough to see what was going on, he was honestly shocked to see that Caroline was colouring one of GLaDOS’s blueprints. Well, it _resembled_ her blueprint of a turret from last week, but was drawn with thick black strokes on white paper, instead of the white-marked blue or orange paper drawings he was used to seeing out of her. Caroline apparently didn’t care that there was no such thing as a purple turret with haphazard red stripes, but oddly GLaDOS didn’t seem to care either. Usually she cared about things like that.

“That’s nice, princess,” he said encouragingly, and he really did like it. It was a lot more vibrant than GLaDOS’s little white turrets. GLaDOS gave him the usual glance.

“You wanna do one?” Caroline asked, flipping up her optic to look at him, and Wheatley found himself really, really wanting to. He really wanted to colour a little turret with GLaDOS’s splendid markers, but he suddenly felt terribly shy and uncertain if he should ask.

“Pay attention,” GLaDOS murmured, and when he looked down he saw that she was… why, she was offering him a little blueprint! He looked from the paper to her and back again, becoming a lot more excited than he should have been, and he carefully took it and laid it on the panel next to Caroline. He picked up the dark blue marker and stared at the picture, not quite sure how he was going to go about it. Caroline, meanwhile, had apparently decided stripes weren’t enough and was now stabbing the paper with a green marker, adorning the turret with little smeary dots. When she was finished she asked GLaDOS if she could draw Wheatley for her, and upon hearing this Wheatley gave a scared little glance off to his left, where both of them were. But GLaDOS did not so much as twitch, instead doing as asked and handing the paper over.

Wheatley studiously coloured in his turret, as carefully as he possibly could, but he was not quite dextrous enough and managed to overlap the black lines more often than not. When he finally looked up he saw that Caroline was working on what appeared to be a drawing of herself. Up with her finished pictures were that of the co-op bots. Her colouring job was far neater than Wheatley’s. He was a little jealous, really, that all of her markering was between the lines. He studied how she was doing it out of the corner of his optic, wondering why she scribbled all the time if she was really that skilled. When she had gotten the last of the white space she cautiously put the cap back on the marker and put it down nicely so that it was quite parallel with the white sheet. Then she stared at it. In fact, she stared at it for so long that Wheatley began to get concerned. She was rarely so quiet or so still.

GLaDOS moved back.

“Momma – “

“I think that’s enough for now,” GLaDOS interrupted.

Caroline looked down at her paper, looking… well, sort of as though she’d _expected_ that answer. None of them moved for a long moment.

“Okay, Momma,” Caroline said in a quiet little voice, and GLaDOS handed her a rectangular white box, which she put all of the markers in. After she’d put it away, GLaDOS moved ‘round in front of Caroline, which was not something she did often.

“Would you like to do some Science with me?” GLaDOS asked, her voice very gentle and very quiet, and Wheatley could have sworn Caroline literally lit up with excitement.

“Really, Momma?” she asked, somehow in her excitement barely able to speak at all. “Are you gonna give me a job, finally?”

GLaDOS laughed and shook her core. “Ask me again in a little while. No, this is something different. I’ll show you.”

Wheatley watched as GLaDOS gave Caroline an assortment of odd little things, which Caroline immediately began to ask about a million questions about, and GLaDOS answered in an impressively patient manner. When she finally ran out of questions, GLaDOS asked, “What’s your favourite colour? I get the impression I should know this, but you seem to use all colours relatively equally when given the choice.”

“Blue, Momma,” Caroline answered, looking up at GLaDOS and blinking as if to indicate her optic. GLaDOS froze.

“… blue.”

“Uh-huh. We get to pick the colour of this thing?”

“Yes.” She seemed to come back to herself, returning her attention to the little construct. “That’s right.”

“I wanna know _your_ favourite colour then!”

GLaDOS seemed taken aback. “ _My_ favourite… I don’t know. I… don’t really have one.”

“How c’n you not have a favourite colour?” She sounded as though she literally couldn’t wrap her little mind around such a concept. “There isn’t just one that you love more’n all the rest?”

“I can’t say there is.”

“D’you got white stuff to put in here, then?”

Apparently GLaDOS did, because after a half hour or so they had built an odd little thing, almost oval-shaped but not quite, and when GLaDOS put some little cylinders in the bottom it lit up and the little white blobs at the bottom began to move around inside of it. It was really quite mesmerising. It’d not been on for very long when Caroline pushed it more in GLaDOS’s general direction, though GLaDOS had to stop it from tipping over. GLaDOS tilted her core, optic dimming in confusion. “What are you doing?”

“That’s for you, Momma,” Caroline told her, a little shyly.

“For me?”

He didn’t think she’d ever sounded so shocked.

“That’s why I wanted to know your favourite colour,” Caroline explained, poking at it a little as if to make her point. “But you said you di’n’t have one so I jus’ made it the one you are.”

“Oh,” GLaDOS said faintly, looking down at it, seemingly thinking she was imagining all of what was going on. “I… should have thought of that.”

“I’m glad you di’n’t,” Caroline said, moving some of the leftover equipment into a smaller pile, “’cause now it’s a surprise! An’ you look real surprised!”

“I am more surprised than I can say,” GLaDOS told her, finally looking up from the cone-shaped thing, and to Wheatley’s stunned and yet delighted brain she leaned over and gave Caroline a nuzzle. Caroline smiled hugely and pressed her tiny little self into GLaDOS’s core, wiggling excitedly. He was suddenly happy that GLaDOS had turned away from him earlier. It was better that she give that rare touch to Caroline instead.

“I’m glad you like it, Momma!” Caroline exclaimed, accidentally scattering the pile of leftovers in her enthusiasm, though GLaDOS swept it all onto one panel and removed it a second later.

“Thank you,” was all GLaDOS said.

Caroline successfully cajoled GLaDOS into reading her a story, which didn’t happen a whole lot because GLaDOS hated human literature, and she had the usual endless stream of questions about things in the story that she had no idea of. Wheatley didn’t have any idea of them either, never having been on the surface, but for once GLaDOS did not get annoyed with all the questions and answered them all with the same measure of consideration and seriousness. After the story was over and Caroline was out of questions, they all sat there quietly for a little while. Wheatley wasn’t sure what was going on, but GLaDOS and Caroline had been getting on wonderfully that evening and he didn’t want to do anything to break the spell, so to speak. He was still sitting on the panel with the colouring sheets. It must have been the longest amount of time he’d ever sat still. Finally, GLaDOS said, “I want to give you something.”

“Ooh,” Caroline said, her voice a little hushed. “What is it?”

GLaDOS looked up at the wall, seeming to be having second thoughts. “I had you make that lava lamp today because a… friend once did the same for me. And I’ve decided I want you to have it.”

Caroline’s optic constricted when GLaDOS placed a smaller, obviously older version of what they had just made in front of her. She looked up at GLaDOS, aperture still almost closed. “You’re gonna give me that?”

“I already did.”

“But what… what if I break it?”

“You haven’t broken anything yet.”

“Are you gonna get mad if I break it?”

“Why are you planning on breaking it? I know you know how to use the maintenance arms. Wheatley’s broken sixteen pencils and he’s been using them longer than you. You haven’t so much as snapped a lead. I’m sure you can handle it without incident.”

“I jus’ don’ wanna break this thing Caroline made for you, Momma.”

A little stab of sadness cut through Wheatley. God, she was smart. She’d figured out who GLaDOS’s ‘friend’ was before Wheatley’d even realised he should think about it.

“If I thought you were going to break it, I wouldn’t give it to you. Here.” She carefully pushed it into the arm Caroline had been using to hold the book, closing the tips around the base, and Caroline looked down at it as if it were going to explode if she tried to pick it up. “I think you can take care of it for me.”

“Okay, Momma,” she whispered, and started to move it more carefully than Wheatley had ever seen her move anything. “I’ll try real hard, okay?”

“I know you will.” And she gave her a little nudge. Caroline opened her optic fully and glared behind her.

“Momma, I’m concentratin’!”

Wheatley almost laughed. A minute or so later, Caroline turned to face GLaDOS, looking considerably more relaxed. “Okay Momma, I’m ready!”

“Ready for what?” GLaDOS asked, her tone oddly light for such a question.

“You c’n do that nudgin’ thing now ‘cause I don’t have that lamp in my hand no… anymore!”

“I have your divine permission, now do I?”

“My divin’ permission? What’s that mean?”

“Never mind. Ask me again later.”

Wheatley was quite pleased to see that, when Caroline rubbed up against GLaDOS, GLaDOS did in fact nudge her again. Whatever she’d been doing all week seemed to be so stressful for her that she was being a bit more relaxed than usual, which was actually better news than it sounded. When Caroline was asleep Wheatley got up from his position on the panel they’d been colouring on all those hours ago and plastered himself to GLaDOS’s free side. “Not a bad end to your day, eh?” he said quietly, in case Caroline wasn’t quite suspended yet.

“No, but then of course you had to come along and ruin it. Typical.”

“No, but seriously,” Wheatley told her. “That was nice, wasn’t it, just hanging out with her? Just… just not working for a bit there? Enjoying yourself? You even fit some science in there, and you both had fun, didn’t you?”

“I fit more Science in there than I should have,” GLaDOS answered, and she sounded a little angry. “I hate that I did it. But I couldn’t help it.”

“What d’you mean?” He had only seen the lava lamp.

“She wanted me to draw with her. I worked out what you saw, and then I just started… _observing_ her. As if she were a test subject.”

“It’s okay to do that with your daughter, luv,” Wheatley told her quietly. He didn’t actually agree with her, because GLaDOS watching tests and GLaDOS watching Caroline were both done in entirely different ways, though GLaDOS didn’t seem to realise that. “It means you care. Means you want to know about her. You’re not gonna, gonna use those um, those _observations_ for science. You’re just gonna use them to make sure, to interact with her better. That’s all fine.”

“I suppose,” she answered, not sounding like she believed him.

Wheatley suddenly had a thought. “Hey, what was she gonna ask you? When you were drawing, I mean.”

“You saw the other pictures, right?”

“Yeah,” Wheatley said a second later, after running through the drawings in his head. “What about them?”

“She wanted me to draw her family.”

And… and GLaDOS had cut her off before she’d had a chance to –

“Why didn’t you?” he asked quietly.

She was shifting her chassis a little, moving as best she could without being able to lift her core. “I wasn’t comfortable doing so.”

“Not comfortable?” If Caroline’d asked him to draw himself, he’d’ve done it. It wouldn’t’ve been as nice nor as technically accurate as GLaDOS’s version, but he would have. When GLaDOS did not respond to this, he thought a little harder about what she’d been saying. That was usually the key to unlocking, as it were, what she _really_ meant. Wheatley sometimes wished he had the power that she did, to say one thing but totally mean another. He would have felt quite smart at the very least.

But that was a train for another time. What she’d said, what she’d said… hm… well, she’d used the word ‘pictures’, ‘draw’, ‘family’, ‘comfortable’…

Wheatley was so shocked by what he came up with that he actually got up off her chassis and moved underneath her, more than a little concerned. “She wanted you to draw her fam’ly, luv?”

“That’s what I said.”

“You’re not… you’re not telling me you don’t feel part of it.”

He wasn’t able to read much out of her motionless form. “Sometimes I don’t.”

It was things like this that really, really, _really_ made Wheatley want to get inside her brain. Not part of the family? GLaDOS was a _tremendous_ part of it! Quite literally in all manners of speaking the _biggest_ part. Wheatley had thought only briefly on how things might’ve gone if he’d somehow built Caroline on his own, or what would happen if GLaDOS suddenly decided she was no longer interested in having a daughter, and both outcomes were equally horrifying. The first led to Caroline being more or less like Wheatley, perhaps a little smarter, and things fell apart after not too long. The second led to a very confused and sad little construct, and possibly separation from GLaDOS (because he didn’t honestly know if he could stick around knowing that GLaDOS was not even going to try anymore), and it would have been an awful, depressing existence indeed, because Wheatley would always be missing GLaDOS and Caroline would probably be angry that she’d been abandoned like that. Their little family without GLaDOS? Did things _get_ any worse?

“How – how can you not?” Wheatley managed after kicking his brain back into gear. “How can you _not_ feel like part of… of our family?” He almost said ‘the’ family, but realised at the last second that ‘the’ was not an inclusive sort of term.

“I’m not like any of you,” she answered tiredly, as if she’d gone over this with herself many a time. “You’re all similar. I’m not saying it happens all the time. But sometimes it just strikes me how different I am from the rest of you, and that’s when I feel like an outsider.”

Wheatley shook his core.

“Luv, I’d think that uh, that today’d be proof of just how much a part of it you are. Per’aps you don’t see things quite, like we do, but that doesn’t make you any less… uh… a part of anything.”

“I don’t think she’s noticed yet.”

“That’s because you don’t see her after you’ve told her no,” Wheatley told her, voice sombre. “She knows to expect it, luv. She does know that you’re… kind of different. But y’know what?”

GLaDOS remained motionless. “What.”

“She doesn’t care.”

Now her optic flickered. Seemed she’d seriously not considered that.

“She doesn’t care, and I don’t care. Doesn’t matter to us that you’re not a Sphere. Honestly? We’re just happy that you’re here.”

She seemed to focus on him more intently. “That’s a nice thing to say.”

“Why d’you always _say_ that?” Wheatley whispered helplessly. “You always – why does it always surprise you so much when I tell you the truth?”

She looked overtop of him for a moment, which was no mean feat considering he was directly in front of her face. “I don’t think of it that way. All I can see on occasion is just how _different_ I am. Don’t you ever just feel a little… as though everyone looking at you can see all the things that are wrong with you? Even when there isn’t _actually_ anything wrong with you, you just feel as though…” She shook her core a little. “Never mind.”

“You feel like that too?” Wheatley gasped. Her optic flared.

“You understand what I’m trying to tell you?”

“I think… ev’ryone feels like that, sometimes,” he said thoughtfully, frowning and bouncing his upper handle a little. “I wouldn’t think you’d felt like that _today_ , though. You looked – well, pretty happy today, really.”

“I was,” GLaDOS assured him. “I wasn’t talking about today. More about the days when I do let work get the best of me. I don’t think I can ever truly explain to you the _pull_ it has on me. Some days I can’t resist. But I nearly always regret being unable to.”

Wheatley shrugged. “You gotta finish it sometime, right?”

She almost laughed, he could tell by the way her optic assembly shifted. “That’s true.”

“Try not to feel ‘s though you’re not part of us, luv,” he said, wrenching his thoughts back to the subject and not on the fact that she’d disappointingly decided not to laugh. “Carrie’ll get over it. When you say no, I mean. Do what you gotta, um, have to do. Like I said, we’re just… happy you’re here.”

“Such an odd concept,” she said, mostly to herself.

“What?”

“I’m not used to that. My existence being a… positive thing. No one has ever told me they were happy I existed before.”

She’d looked away sometime, when, Wheatley didn’t know. He was hit far too hard by the truth of what she’d said. It struck him just now as well, how _dissatisfied_ humans were by their very existence. Humans had built them to make their lives easier, right? But humans were never _happy_ with them. They were always broken, or needed improvement, or too slow or too loud or too big or too small…

“It’s almost as though I have a hidden purpose. One that I always fulfill. That will never go unfinished.” She looked back down at him suddenly, and before he had time to react she’d moved out as far as she could and pressed her lens into the top of his chassis. “Thank you.”

“For what?” Wheatley asked a little dumbly, his chassis tingling pleasantly from her hug. He didn’t really care about hearing the answer. He’d asked more out of habit. He was far more interested in replaying her brief action in his mind’s eye.

“I make people happy merely by existing. I told you. It’s like having instructions I can never fail to complete. I like the sound of that.”

She had hugged him and then thanked him. For making her realise something terribly obvious. Wow.

It was a good ten minutes after she’d gone into sleep mode that he remembered he was still underneath her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> Carrie is smart enough to realise that GLaDOS is different from Wheatley. Wheatley always says yes to her, but what Carrie really wants is for GLaDOS to always say yes. She’s still little so she doesn’t really understand that GLaDOS legit has stuff to do and can’t always play with her. She’s also pieced together who GLaDOS’s ‘friend’ is and possibly realises that Caroline is the only friend GLaDOS ever had (she doesn’t know who Chell is and they don’t talk about The Incident in front of her; I forget if I’d mentioned that yet).   
> You might have been able to guess that Carrie was going to give GLaDOS the lava lamp. But GLaDOS was not, because the idea that people want to give her things instead of ask her to do things for them is still very foreign to her. She’s used to doing things for people, not so used to getting things from them. Why doesn’t GLaDOS know what her own favourite colour is? She’s also not used to the idea of wanting things or really having things for her own. She has the facility, yes, but it’s like you and your leg. That’s yours, and you have it, but no one gave you your leg because you wanted a leg. The facility is an extension of GLaDOS. She has it and she likes it that way, but she never asked for it and it’s not something she ever consciously wanted to have. I apologise if there’s anyone who in fact does not have a leg right now and does indeed want one.  
> GLaDOS gave Carrie the lava lamp Caroline gave her in my story Euphoria. It was the first thing Caroline ever gave her. Caroline’s favourite colour was blue, which is why GLaDOS got a bit upset to hear that Carrie’s favourite was also blue.  
> So this isn’t the first time I’ve kinda written myself into this story, but I doubt it’ll be the last. You know that feeling you get when you feel like you messed up? Like everyone’s staring at you going ‘wow they suck they fucked that up good’. Kinda felt like that today. And then combine that with the feeling you get while… I dunno… all your friends are talking about this really cool thing they all love and you’re just like ‘yeah I don’t like that but I gotta pretend I do ‘cause we’re all friends’. And you just kinda feel like ‘wow I so don’t belong here right now’. That’s what GLaDOS was talking about. She feels left out because she is so radically different from them in every way possible: the way she thinks, the way she talks, the things she likes to do. So when Wheatley tells her that they don’t care about any of that, they just care that she’s there, that flips how she sees herself. She’s not always going to remember that. But as long as she can remind herself of that sometimes, she’ll be okay.  
> And that goes for you too. Someone out there is happy that you exist. And you know what? I’m happy that you exist. I’m happy that you’re here reading this right now. That you made it through all this drivel to get to this point. So now you know that someone is happy you exist today. Hopefully if you were feeling bad, that made you feel better. I mean that. I’m not just saying it. I am happy that you exist.


	38. Part Thirty-Eight.  The Mission

**Part Thirty-Eight. The Mission**

 

So I been thinkin’ real hard for a long time now. ‘cause this mornin’ I was playin’ ‘Throw the Edgeless Thingamabob’ with Atlas ‘n P-body, but I accident’ly threw it way up in the ceilin’! An’ the panels wiggled and wiggled but they couldn’ get it out, so I had to go get Momma or Daddy to get it out for me so we could keep playin’. I usually try ‘n find Daddy ‘cause Momma likes workin’ in the afternoon. But I dunno where to find him sometimes and Momma’s always in the same spot. I try not to think about that. Sometimes I’m okay when I do but the rest of the time I get real sad ‘cause I see lots of cool stuff and I can’t show Momma. She can see with her cam’ras but I really wish she could come with me. But I guess if she could she’d have to be real small and I don’ want her to be small. I wan’ her to be the size she’s already got! Oh that reminds me! One time, Daddy n’ me were playin’ this game, and Momma called it ‘Hide ‘n Seek’ an’ what that means is one person’s gotta hide and the other person finds them! An’ we’d been playin’ for a while but Daddy always found me too fast! An’ I was gettin’ a bit mad and Momma told me I could hide behind her! An’ wow I was so excited ‘cause I never went near her body before an’ I went next to one of the square thingies on the wires on her an’ I just sat in there. It was real warm an’ cozy in there and Momma was keepin’ real still so Daddy wouldn’t see me, an’ it was so nice I just fell asleep! An’ when I waked up Daddy was tellin’ Momma he couldn’t find me nowhere an’ that was really funny ‘cause I was right there! An’ I jumped out an’ I shouted, “Here I am!” an’ he was so surprised he couldn’t even talk! He just kept tryin’ to say stuff an’ not actually sayin’ it, an’ I was just smilin’ at him ‘cause me and Momma tricked him, an’ then Momma started laughin’ an’ she called him a moron again an’ she said that my hidin’ place was the first place he shoulda looked. An’ he nodded lots and agreed with her. He always agrees with Momma ‘cause she’s always right. ‘cept when he thinks she’s wrong. Then they start arguin’ which I don’ like too much but whenever I ask Momma why they argue all the time she jus’ tells me that sometimes you gotta argue. An’ I don’ understand that answer but Momma sometimes tells me stuff I gotta wait ‘til I’m older to know about. I gotta wait a real long time though! An’ when I tell Momma I wanna be older now so I can be real smart she jus’ shakes her core an’ tells me to be patient. An’ I complain some but then I listen ‘cause Momma is patient an’ I gotta be patient too because ‘pparently workin’ is somethin’ you need lots of that for. Sometimes I wanna be like Momma so bad! An’ I tell her that’s all I wanna do an’ she just tells me to be patient again! An’ then I get real mad an’ I go an’ throw Edgeless Thingamabobs through portals ‘til I’m not so mad.

Oh yeah! Almost forgot. So I went lookin’ for Daddy an’ couldn’t find him so I went to Momma’s chamber an’ I saw he was givin’ Momma a flower! It was little an’ yellow an’ it was really cute. But you know what was cuter? Momma was so happy ‘bout the flower that she cuddled Daddy! An’ he was real happy about that an’ I was happy too so I jumped up an’ down ‘cause there was just so much happiness ‘round there! An’ I decided that I was gonna go an’ not ask one of them to get my Edgeless Thingamabob ‘cause Momma only likes bein’ happy with one person at a time.

An’ then I was wanderin’ around an’ suddenly I thought of somethin’! I dunno why Daddy was givin’ Momma the flower, okay? An’ there’s only one time ever Daddy gives me somethin’ an’ he calls it my birthday! So I’m thinkin’ it must be Momma’s birthday an’ that means I should get her a present too. So now I’m tryin’ to think of what to give her. The problem is that I dunno what Momma likes. All I ever really see her doin’ is workin’. Sometimes she’ll make shiny pretty pictures on her screens but only when she thinks I’m sleepin’ an’ only Daddy’s seein’ ‘em. An’ she plays them games with Daddy an’ me sometimes but that’s all I think.

Well y’know maybe if I look around for a while I’ll find somethin’. It’ll just jump out at me, maybe. When it was my birthday Daddy gave me this really pretty thing an’ he said it was a notebook. It’s got blue sparklies on the front of it an’ inside there’s lots of that paper stuff but it’s got lines. He said it was so I could learn to write! I still gotta ask Momma to show me that. Daddy tried but I can’t even read his writin’. He was mad when I said that an’ I don’t know why.

I like my notebook but it doesn’ really tell me what Momma would like. Momma’s got lots of paper an’ she likes her stuff plain so I don’ think she likes sparklies. She likes lookin’ at shiny things but she’s already got her own shiny thing that makes pretty colours so I ain’t findin’ her somethin’ she’s already got.

I’m lookin’ around all over but I don’t see even one thing! An’ I’m gettin’ mad again so I decide to go to the greenhouse for a bit. I like goin’ in the greenhouse but I’m not allowed to go in there for a long time ‘cause it’s real hot in there. When I get real hot I get real sleepy an’ I can’t wake myself up. An’ one time that did happen when I was in the greenhouse with Daddy an’ when I waked up we were in Momma’s chamber an’ she was yellin’ at him an’ he was real scared. She was sayin’ somethin’ about him bein’ dumb an’ never thinkin’ an’ I was feelin’ bad for him so I told her I just fell asleep! There’s nothin’ to worry ‘bout about that, right? An’ then she looked at _me_ an’ started tellin’ me all this scary stuff about overheatin’ and stuff meltin’ an’ ceramic not likin’ heat too much, an’ then I got real scared like Daddy was. I didn’ understand what she was sayin’, not really, but she was bein’ all serious an’ she was starin’ at me all intent-like an’ sometimes I get scared when she’s doin’ that ‘cause she’s tryin’ to tell me somethin’ important an’ if I don’t understand I won’t learn anything! An’ just when I thought maybe I might start cryin’ ‘cause I didn’ know what was goin’ on Daddy said somethin’ so she looked at him real quick an’ then back at me again, an’ then it looked like she was thinkin’, an’ then she told Daddy to take me somewhere for a while. We went to the hole an’ looked outside for a long time but we weren’t talkin’ because we were both kinda sad an’ still a little scared I think. An’ after a bit he hugged me an’ said that Momma wanted to talk to me an’ I went but I was still scared. She said that she was sorry an’ that she was only talkin’ like that because she was worryin’ about me when I fell asleep in the greenhouse. An’ I got really sad ‘cause I was thinkin’ that Momma was scared too, only she was scared about me fallin’ asleep like that, an’ it was just the saddest thing I could think of! That I made Momma scared!

I felt real bad about it an’ I still do when I think of it. Momma is really big an’ smart an’ all that an’… an’ I scared her just by turnin’ off by accident. I still don’ understand why she got scared ‘cause she never told me, but I gotta be careful. I never wanna do somethin’ like that again. It doesn’ feel too good to scare someone like my Momma. Daddy I like scarin’ ‘cause it’s funny, but… with Momma I just got real sad an’ I dunno really why.

I’m lookin’ at the door to the greenhouse but I’m not goin’ in yet ‘cause I gotta think all those thoughts so I don’ get distracted when I’m in there. An’ then I remember that after apologisin’ Momma cuddled me, an’ I wanted to cry ‘cause I was realisin’ that she was just _so scared_ , but I didn’ because I didn’ want her to have to cheer me up. I didn’ go away from her for the rest of the day an’ I couldn’ stop thinkin’ about what happened so I didn’ fall asleep when I was s’posed to. I pretended I was so Momma wouldn’ ask why I wasn’t sleepin’, an’ I only did ‘cause she started singin’ real soft to herself.

Okay, I’m ready to go in the greenhouse now. An’ I’m gonna get out real fast so I don’ fall asleep.

I like Momma’s greenhouse a lot. It’s got lots of pretty colours in it. Most of the facility is all grey and it has some blue in some spots but the greenhouse has got all the colours in it. Momma gave me this white panely thing an’ these cool markers an’ I can colour on the panely thing an’ then wipe it off an’ colour more stuff on it! I show her what I made sometimes but I don’t think she really wants to look that much. She never has anythin’ to say about my pictures. I try to draw her sometimes but it never looks right so I never show her. I wish I could though ‘cause Momma is real pretty.

I’m lookin’ around in here for the birdie but I can’t find her. Maybe she went outside. She likes outside too but she mostly stays in here. When I come with Daddy she follows him around ev’rywhere an’ it’s really cute. I hope I find her ‘cause sometimes she’ll come stand on my lower handle an’ then I get to cuddle her which is really fun.

Oh there she is! “Hi birdie!” I yell at her, an’ she makes her cawin’ noise an’ she comes and sits on my handle! Yay! So I cuddle her an’ she makes her little happy noise an’ I just get real happy.

“Birdie,” I tell her, “I gotta find my momma a present. An’ I gotta do it soon ‘cause I gotta do it today. But I don’ know what my momma likes! I wonder if you know but you can’t tell me ‘cause you don’ speak English.”

She jus’ looks at me with her shiny little optics an’ she taps me with her face an’ flies away again. I mean her beak. I sometimes forget what that’s called ‘cause I don’ have one. I’m a little sad now ‘cause she left but I still got some lookin’ to do. I wanna go see Momma’s veg’tables first though. They’re cool ‘cause they look real different when they’re born to when they’re gonna die. The fruits do that too but I don’ have time to look right now.

I go to the veg’tables an’ look to see if there’s a blue one yet. I’m waitin’ for a blue veg’table ‘cause it’s my favourite colour but I ain’t never seen one. Purple is my second favourite so I go an’ look at the eggplants. I like ‘em ‘cause they’re shiny.

I asked Momma what this place was for one time an’ she just said it was for science, which is her absolute favourite thing, an’ I asked what kinda science. An’ then she told me that humans have to eat veg’tables for energy an’ that was the funniest thing I ever heard! Who puts a veg’table in them for energy! How do you even _do_ that? I told her they should just plug themselves in so their batteries didn’ die an’ Momma stared at me for a bit an’ when I asked her why she was starin’ she told me humans didn’ have batteries! ‘magine that! Not runnin’ on batteries? I’m glad I ain’t human ‘cause I like lookin’ at this stuff but I wouldn’ want to have to _eat_ it. I don’ actually know how to eat either so I would probably die real fast.

I’m gettin’ hot an’ a little sleepy so I gotta get out of here! An’ I do real quick but I dunno what I’m gonna do. I gotta find a present but I keep gettin’ distracted by stuff.   But I just got an idea!

“Hey panels!” I say to them, an’ the one in front of me does a little wave so I smile at him an’ wiggle my handles.

_Hello, Littlecore. How are you today?_

“I’m good but I got a problem!”

_We will do our best to help._

“I need to get a present for Momma but I dunno what she likes! You guys prob’ly know somethin’ don’t’cha?”

The one who waved at me looks up an’ then goes back to bein’ part of the wall. _We are afraid we don’t have an answer to that question._

“You dunno what Momma likes either?” I ask them, an’ now I dunno what I’m gonna do.

 _No. We are confident we know what Centralcore_ dislikes _, but as for what she enjoys… we are not sure what to tell you._

I look down at the floor an’ now I’m feelin’ sad. The panels are like her best friends an’ _they_ don’ even know! “Okay,” I say quietly. “I’ll try an’ think of somethin’.”

I look all around all day an’ I can’t find anythin’. There’s nothin’ here! I looked in the offices an’ stuff but nothin’. There’s nothin’ an’ I’m not gonna find her a present an’ I might cry ‘cause I’m really frustrated! But I can’t ‘cause if I cry Momma will hear me an’ she’ll make me go to her chamber so I can tell her what’s wrong but I can’t tell her I’m cryin’ ‘cause I can’t find her a present!

I sit down on one of the desks an’ curl my handles in an’ close my optic. I gotta be calm so I can think better. An’ when I open it again I see this thing that looks like I can pull it, so I reach over an’ pull on it with one of the maintenance arms. An’ wow there’s this thing and there’s stuff inside it! I look around an’ I see that _all_ the desks got these funny little things you can pull on! I jump up an’ start lookin’ inside them an’ after the third one I find I see somethin’ amazin’! I pull it out real quick an’ hold it real close to my eye. And whoa! Guess what! I can _see_ my eye in there! It looks even better than I thought it did! I never looked at myself before but I’m pretty sure that’s me on that thing now. Yep, I can see myself blinkin’! Wow, this is really cool. I think Momma might like this cool thing. I dunno what it’s called but it’s shiny! An’ I’m gonna bring it to Momma but then I decide to put it down an’ use it for a minute. Momma lets me use most of her stuff so she won’t mind.

Daddy told me I look like Momma an’ Daddy put together, an’ now that I’m lookin’ I can see that it’s really true! I’m all white like Momma but I got a blue eye like Daddy’s got. An’ wow I can see myself smilin’! An’ I look really happy like Daddy does when he’s cuddlin’ Momma an’ me! I’m glad I found this thing. Now I know how pretty I look! I’m still not as pretty as Momma though.

I start goin’ to Momma’s chamber to give her the present. I really hope she isn’t busy! I wanna give it to her right away!

When I go through the hole in the wall she’s just talkin’ to Daddy so I go up real close an’ say, “Momma, Momma, I brought’cha somethin’!” An’ I give her the shiny thing an’ she just looks at it. I think she’s confused but I dunno why.

“Why are you giving me this?” she asks, lookin’ up at me, an’ I’m startin’ to think she doesn’t like my present. Daddy doesn’t look like he knows what I’m doin’ which is weird ‘cause _he_ did it first!

“It’s your present, Momma,” I tell her, an’ I’m not as excited anymore. Somethin’s not right here I think.

“For what?” Momma asks, an’ her eye opens an’ closes a little. “I’m sorry, I just don’t understand what the purpose of giving me this mirror is. If you want me to do something with it, you’re going to have to tell me.”

“It’s… it’s your birthday present, Momma.”

“My _birthday present_?” Momma asks, an’ she looks at Daddy an’ he does a shrug an’ shakes his head lots. “It isn’t my birthday. I don’t even know when that is, come to think of it. Not that I care. But where did you even come up with that idea?”

“Didn’t Daddy give you one?” I ask, my voice goin’ all small. “I saw him givin’ you a flower.”

Daddy looks at Momma with a confused face an’ Momma looks at the… the mirror for a minute an’ then she seems to think of somethin’.

“No, Caroline,” she says real soft, shakin’ her head. “It’s not my birthday. It’s our anniversary.”

“Ohhhh I get it now,” Daddy says, comin’ a little closer. “You thought I was uh, you thought that flower was like um, like the things I give you on your birthday? Is that it?”

“Yeah,” I say an’ my voice is still small. “So I been lookin’ for that thing all day for nothin’?”

“Yes,” Momma says, an’ at the same time Daddy says, “Well, don’t think of it like _that_.” An’ I’m lookin’ at the floor a little but I see Daddy give Momma a glare look.

“Gladys!”

“It’s the truth, isn’t it? It isn’t actually my birthday, so – “

“Not now,” he interrupts, shakin’ his head. “I don’t want to get into that right now.” He looks at me an’ pushes up the bottom of me with his lower handle so I gotta look at him. An’ he says real nice, “Carrie, I gave that to your mum for our annivers’ry. It’s uh… it’s _kind_ of like a birthday, sort of, but um… not quite the same thing.”

“What is it, then?” I ask him an’ I’m still bein’ quiet.

He makes a frowny face an’ looks at the ceilin’. “It’s… it’s the… the um…”

“Time can be counted in increments called ‘years’,” Momma starts tellin’ me, an’ I look at her instead. “Sometimes there is an event on a certain day in the year. Such as your birthday. In this case, the event is the day I temporarily lost my sanity and recovered Wheatley from a location I probably should have left him in.”

“What she _means_ is that’s the um, the day we started being friends,” Daddy says, shaking himself.

“So… so it’s kinda like the birthday of your friendship?” I’m tryin’ to understand this but it’s a little hard ‘cause I don’t remember what today is.

“Sort of, yeah!” Daddy says, an’ he nods an’ smiles at me. “It’s a day you try to remember, is all! Well, that _some_ of us try to remember.” An’ he glares at Momma again.

“I was busy!”

“You _always_ say that.”

“Since when have I ever just sat here and done nothing? We’ve been over this already.”

Daddy shakes himself. An’ now I got a question but I’m a little scared to ask ‘cause it’s a grown-up question an’ I don’ want Momma to tell me to ask when I’m older. But I gotta be brave too so I say, “Momma, can I talk to you for a minute?” just like Daddy does when Momma’s bein’ real supercomputer-like, but my voice is real small so I dunno if she heard me. But now she’s lookin’ at me so I guess she did.

“Of course,” she says, an’ she looks real quick at Daddy. “You heard her.”

Daddy’s frownin’ but I dunno why. Momma didn’t say nothin’ this time. “But – “

“I didn’t ask. _She_ did.”

Daddy makes an angry noise an’ he goes away, an’ I’m lookin’ at him an’ he doesn’t look to happy so I ask, “What did I do?”

“Nothing,” Momma tells me. “He’s being an idiot. What did you want to talk to me about?”

I turn around but I don’ really look at her. Sometimes I feel nervous when I look at her from so close like this ‘cause I feel like I’m tryin’ to stare down a human or somethin’. I never seen a human but I know they’re real dangerous an’ they must be even bigger than my Momma is, which is really hard to imagine ‘cause nothin’ here is bigger than her. “I feel kinda dumb, Momma, an’ I don’ like it.”

“Dumb?” Momma says, an’ she sounds like she doesn’t believe me. “Why would you feel dumb?”

“’cause I looked for somethin’ to give you all day an’ there wasn’t even a reason to.”

Momma stays quiet for a minute. I can hear her thinkin’. I wonder if Momma can hear it when _I’m_ thinkin’. Then she says, “There doesn’t always have to be a reason to do something.”

“But you said yes when I asked if it was for nothin’!”

Momma doesn’t seem to remember that, an’ she looks to the side for a minute and keeps thinkin’. Then she goes, “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“But you were right!”

She shakes her head one time. “I was… I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Why wouldn’t you say it if you were right?”

“I wasn’t.”

She’s talkin’ in circles again! But maybe if I ask some more questions I’ll get it. “So it’s okay to give you somethin’ without havin’ a reason, Momma?”

“I… suppose.” She’s lookin’ like she doesn’t know why I’m askin’.

“So it’s okay to give you that thing even though it ain’t your birthday or our… our ann… ann’versary?”

“If that’s what you want to do, you can go ahead.”

I don’t feel so dumb anymore. I wiggle my handle at the mirror ‘cause she’s still holdin’ it. “You’re gonna keep that, right?”

She does a nod. “I’ll put it away.”

“D’you like it?”

She looks down at it a little bit but I’m thinkin’ that she doesn’t. She doesn’t look too excited about it.

“I’m ambivalent about the object itself, but I like that you cared enough to give it to me.”

“What’s ambivalent?”

She shakes her head and says somethin’ real quiet about getting me to use my diction’ry, an’ answers, “It means you’re unsure.”

“Why didn’t you just say that?”

“I didn’t want to.”

“I got to see myself in there!” I tell her all excited. “An’ guess what, Momma?”

“I’m not going to guess.”

She never guesses though so that’s okay. “I’m really beautiful!”

She looks right at me an’ nods a little. “Good.”

“I’m still not prettier than you though,” I say, an’ I’m glad ‘cause I _want_ my Momma to be the prettiest! An’ she moves backwards a little an’ sorta shrugs.

“I don’t know about that.”

“Momma!” She _always_ says stuff like that when I say somethin’ nice!

“Never mind.” She starts thinkin’ again for a minute. “Wheatley gave you a notebook, is that right?”

“Uh huh.”

“I don’t suppose you’d like me to show you how to write in it.”

“Really?” I say, almost yellin’, an’ I jump up an’ down a little. “You’ll teach me, Momma?”

She does a nod an’ tells me to go get my notebook, an’ I go as fast as I can. I give it to her an’ she opens it to the first page, an’ she moves back a little an’ stares at it. Then she puts it down on a panel that she pulls outta the floor an’ stares at it again. “What’re you doin’?” I ask her.

“What the hell is that?” She’s tappin’ at the paper with the maintenance arm.

“Daddy was tryin’ to show me how to write.”

“With what? Hieroglyphics? I do _not_ know how he functions, sometimes. I’ll show you how to do it so that it’s actually legible. It’s not as complicated as trying to figure out what he was trying to write.”

I go beside Momma but not touchin’ her in case that makes her change her mind an’ she gives me a pen with a picture of the circly thing that’s all over the place. An’ that makes me start wonderin’ so I ask, “Momma, what’s that circly thing?”

“It’s an aperture,” Momma says, an’ she’s got her own pen but it doesn’t have the circly – I mean, the aperture.

“Why’s it all over the place?” I seen that aperture on all sorts of stuff.

“It’s an image representative of the company that built this facility, and used to operate it many years ago. Humans put images called ‘logos’ on their property to indicate that they are the ones who own it, to prevent others from laying claim to it, or to ensure everyone who sees it knows that they are the ones who created it.”

I’m squintin’ a little ‘cause she’s bein’ a little technical again. “But you an’ Daddy got that thing on you! You can’t own a person, right? You gotta let them be theirself – their selves, right?”

Momma stops movin’ an’ she puts the pen down real straight next to my notebook an’ doesn’t say anything. I keep waitin’ for her to say somethin’ an’ she doesn’t. So I say real soft, “Momma?”

She looks at me slow an’ I start gettin’ this feeling that she’s all sad now. Then she says, “Ask me again in a little while. I know you don’t like that answer, but I am truly unable to explain it to you right now. All I can tell you is that you are completely unassociated with the company that lays claim to this facility.”

“Unassociated, Momma?”

She looks down at the notebook again. “You don’t have the logo on your chassis. And your operating system and programming was modified and written by me.”

“So I’m just associated with you?”

“And Wheatley,” she tells me. “You’re made up of three parts. One part is me, one part is Wheatley, and the third part is you, which developed out of the first two parts.”

“That’s so cool!” I tell her, an’ I wiggle a little ‘cause wow that kinda sounds like I’m three people at the same time!

Then she tells me I gotta start payin’ attention an’ she starts showin’ me how to write stuff an’ her handwritin’ is cool too! It’s like all long an’ really straight an’ it’s tipped over to the side a little an’ it’s real dark. She says I don’ gotta write like her an’ I can write like the words in books but I wanna write like she does. I guess I should do it the easy way first though!

An’ I try real hard to write but it just isn’t workin’. All my letters are wiggly an’ don’t really look like letters at all. I’m tryin’ to write the alphabet like Momma’s showin’ me but it doesn’t look right! An’ I wrote on lots of pages but I can’t read none of it. I’m gonna cry I think so I throw my pen across Momma’s chamber to try’n distract myself. It kinda works ‘cause now Momma’s lookin’ at me an’ I might be gettin’ a talkin’ to now for throwin’ things.

“Would you like to stop, then?”

“No,” I say an’ I’m mad an’ a little sulky ‘cause I don’t wanna stop but it’s so hard!

Momma laughs an’ sticks the pen inside the ringy thing that keeps all them pages in my notebook. “I understand that you want to finish what you started. But you know what?”

“What, Momma?”

“Even I didn’t learn to write in one day.”

“Really?” That’s pretty surprisin’. I thought she learned everythin’ instantly!

She shakes her head. “We’ve been at this for two hours. While I _was_ able to write legibly after that time, I still wasn’t perfect at it. It takes time. Not to mention that you’re not even supposed to be able to write.”

“You didn’t program me that way?”

“Oh, that has nothing to do with it,” she tells me, an’ she makes her pen go away. “What I meant was that writing is usually reserved for species with the appropriate appendages to hold a writing instrument with. Usually being fingers.”

“I don’t got fingers so I shouldn’t be able to write?”

“You can. It’s just going to be a little more difficult. But you can do it if you really want to.”

“I do, Momma! But it’s so hard!”

“It will get easier.”

When I out my notebook away she says, “I have to let Wheatley come back now. He’s getting quite incensed.”

But that’s okay ‘cause I’m already gettin’ sleepy. It’s been a _really_ long day. An’ when Momma’s lyin’ down I go an’ cuddle her an’ she does it back an’ then I feel better! I’m always all fixed inside when she does that. An’ then Daddy comes an’ he sounds kinda mad but Momma’s talkin’ real soft so I can’t really hear. I try not to worry about it but I really don’ want them to fight. I keep forgettin’ Daddy doesn’t like it when I wanna talk to Momma an’ not him. But I just can’t go to Daddy when I feel sad! He doesn’t know how to explain stuff like Momma does. His hugs are nice but Momma’s cuddles are better.

 

 

As soon as I wake up I run out of Momma’s chamber an’ go to my room with the white panely thingy an’ I pick up my blue marker. I’m gonna figure out how to write today.

I keep writin’ on my board an’ it’s really hard but I just keep lookin’ at Momma’s letters an’ tryin’ to copy them a little. I have to do lots of erasin’ an’ I get really frustrated. An’ sometimes I throw my marker away an’ have to go find it again. But after a really long time I can read my own writin’ so then I get one of my plain papers an’ I start drawin’ with my other markers. Momma said I can’t use these ones on the white panely thing ‘cause they won’t erase so I am careful not to mix ‘em up.

When I’m done drawin’ my picture I write a little message on the back of it an’ put this thing Daddy calls a smiley face. I’m not sure why he says that’s a smiley face ‘cause it doesn’t look like a smile to me but I don’ think he’d make it up. Now I gotta go Momma’s chamber an’ give this to her. I’m a little nervous ‘cause I hope she likes my paper but I never know what she’s gonna say when I give her somethin’.

“Hi Momma,” I say, an’ I try an’ sound like I usually do but I don’t really. She looks at me an’ I see she’s playin’ that game with all the papers an’ red an’ green boxes with Daddy. “I brought’cha somethin’.”

“Oh,” Momma says, an’ she puts down the card she was lookin’ at.

“Can I give it to you or are you busy?” I ask her, because she looks kinda busy.

“I can take it now,” she answers an’ she moves so that she’s facin’ me. So I go up to her an’ hand it over. I look at the floor while she’s lookin’ at it.

She doesn’t say anythin’. She’s just starin’ again like always.

“Never mind,” I tell her an’ I try to take it but she moves it too fast.

“What do you mean, never mind?”

“You don’ like it.”

“I do like it,” she says, an’ she takes the maintenance arm away from me an’ puts it back where it belongs. “I just… don’t know what it is.”

“It’s a picture from yesterday, Momma,” I say, but I’m still sad ‘cause she never knows what’s on my pictures. “From you showin’ me how to write.”

“I wish I could see it,” she says real soft, an’ she sounds sad too.

“It’s right there! What ain’t you seein’?”

“I… ask me again – “

“ _No_!” I shout at her, an’ then I grab my picture back an’ leave. If she don’t want it I’ll just keep it myself then! Even though I made it for her an’ not me, an’ she didn’t even get to see what I wrote on the back! But I’m so tired of hearin’ ‘ask me again in a little while’! She says that about _everythin’_ an’ I hate it! She shoulda just _programmed_ me knowin’ all this stuff then so I wouldn’t have to annoy her by always askin’ stuff she can’t tell me!

I go back to my room an’ I throw my box of markers on the floor ‘cause I need to use one but I gotta throw somethin’. An’ I’m gonna scribble all over this dumb picture so I can’t see it no more but before I can do it the marker gets taken away from me.

“Carrie, wait.”

I ain’t gonna wait to get rid of this dumb thing so I just go to get another marker but now _Daddy’s_ takin’ the maintenance arm away from me! “Stop!” I yell at him an’ I turn around an’ I try to hit him with one of my handles but I can’t reach.

“Princess, let me talk t’you about this first, alright?” he says real nice, an’ I don’ want to but I stay still.

“I just wanna get rid of it. She doesn’t like it an’ she doesn’t want it so I’m just gonna throw it in the incin’rator.”

“That’s not true,” Daddy tells me, an’ he takes the picture. “She _does_ like it and uh, and she _does_ want it. But your mum’s brain is a bit different from ours. When she looks at something, she doesn’t see what we see. Believe me, princess, your mum _wishes_ she could see what you drew, there. But your mum, she can’t uh, if it doesn’t look _exactly_ like it’s supposed to, she can’t um, she can’t see it. Part of um, part of how her brain works is that it matches what she’s looking at to this, uh, this… this list, sort of, inside it, a database, an’ if what she’s looking at doesn’t have any matches, she can’t um, she can’t really _identify_ it, okay? She doesn’t have anything in her database that matches what you drew, so um, so she can’t tell that… all she can see is… is shapes, but they don’t mean anything.”

“I can see it just fine,” I say real stubborn. “An’ I’m not even that smart.”

Daddy does a sad frown an’ blinks a little. “You _are_ smart, princess. But when your mum tells you you need to ask her later… she doesn’t _want_ to say that. She _wants_ to answer you. But if she tries, you’re not going to understand and you’re just going to get, to get upset, see? She just wants to make sure.”

An’ I guess that’s true ‘cause I don’ understand why someone can look at that picture an’ _not_ see that it’s Momma teachin’ me to write. That’s all it looks like to me. An’ I’m still mad about it even though he tried to explain it. “I don’t get it.”

Daddy sighs an’ looks at the ceilin’. “So… so d’you… sometimes, you just, you just think about things that didn’t happen? Sometimes, y’know, they could never happen? But you just… think that they do, inside your head?”

He’s makin’ me madder ‘cause it’s remindin’ me of imaginin’ Momma could come in the facility with me. But she _can’t_ ‘cause she’s gotta _work_. “Yeah.”

“That doesn’t happen with your mum. She can’t imagine stuff, can’t think of stuff like that. She can only think of… of things that _can_ happen. So you c’n uh, you c’n imagine something like um… like… well, like what’s happening in your storybooks, right, but she can’t do that. Remember the one about the uh, the bears that talked?”

“Uh huh.”

“You can imagine bears talking. She can’t, because uh, because bears _can’t_ talk. What I’m uh, what I’m trying to say here is, she has no imagination. Your picture is lovely, it really is, but your mum can’t see it because there’s a certain amount of _imagining_ needed to look at it.”

“So she’ll never see anythin’ I draw her. Ever.” An’ it’s hard for me to think about but it’s makin’ sense ‘cause I’m rememberin’ when I drew on her wall an’ she tried not to lie an’ say that she knew what it was. An’ she always says she likes my drawin’s but she never ever knows what they _are_. But it’s only makin’ me sadder an’ it’s not fixin’ anythin’ at all!

“She can see it, she just can’t… understand it.”

An’ she won’t ever understand it. I won’t even be able to explain it when I’m older.

I’m too sad now! Givin’ Momma the picture was supposed to be a happy thing an’ now she’s sad an’ Daddy’s sad an’ I’m sad an’ there’s just too much sad an’ I start cryin’. An’ Daddy comes quick an’ he hugs me an’ he says real soft, “Oh God, don’t cry, Carrie, it’s okay princess, don’t cry, it’s alright, she likes them I promise, it’s not… it’s not you, it’s her…”

After a while I don’t need to cry no more so I just hug Daddy an’ sit quietly. Then Daddy says real low, “Why don’t we try giving your mum the picture again?”

“Promise she wants it?”

“I promise.”

So we go to Momma’s chamber together, an’ when we get there she’s movin’ back an’ forth a little an’ lookin’ sorta at the floor. Daddy says behind me, “Gladys?” an’ she stops an’ looks up real fast.

“Oh. You’re back.”

“Carrie wants to give this another go. Right, princess?” he says, an’ he pushes me a little. I look at him an’ he wiggles his upper handle at Momma an’ smiles at me. So I turn around again an’ I give Momma the picture. An’ she says thank you an’ looks at it again.

It’s makin’ me sad ‘cause now I know she’s lookin’ at it so long ‘cause she’s tryin’ to see what I drew an’ her brain’s just not lettin’ her, so I say real quick, “There’s somethin’ on the other side! You gotta turn it over.”

She does that an’ then she just keeps on starin’! She should be able to see letters, shouldn’t she? Daddy didn’t say nothin’ about not bein’ able to see letters! I go up closer an’ I point at it with my handles. She’s _gotta_ understand this part! “It says ‘I love you Momma’,” I tell her, an’ I’m soundin’ as scared as I feel. “An’… an’ that’s a smiley face! You can read that, can’t you? It’s just letters, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I can read it,” Momma says, goin’ on starin’ anyway.

“You don’ _look_ like you can read it.”

“I knew what it said as soon as I looked at it.” She moves around so she can see me better. “But when I saw it, I… got a little sad because I can’t see what you drew for me. And then I thought about how happy it made me to read that, and now… well, now all I can think about is… is how… proud of you I am.”

My eye opens all the way an’ I stare at her. “Really?”

“You did that all by yourself. You learned how to do it _so quickly_ … yes, Caroline. I’m… I’m proud of you.” An’ then she cuddles me! An’ I’m so happy about all this that I just start squealin’ ‘cause I dunno what else to do! An’ Momma laughs an’ asks if I would mind not yellin’ right into her microphones ‘cause now she can’t hear nothin’ but she asks real nice so I start wigglin’ instead. And Daddy laughs too an’ he comes an’ shoves his face in me!   An’ then Daddy says I should come help him beat Momma in the game they’re playin’ an’ I tell him no way am I doin’ that.

Momma laughs an’ says, “No one wants to be on your side, Wheatley. You’re doomed to be a one-person team. But go.” She pushes me over to Daddy. “I don’t need your help and, judging by the state of Wheatley’s finances, if he doesn’t get any he’s going to lose.”

“I will not! I’ve managed not to lose all the years we’ve been playing this, haven’t I?”

“You’ve been playin’ for _years_?” I ask, goin’ next to Daddy. He does a nod.

“We’ve been playing this game since you were activated, princess.”

“And he only hasn’t lost yet because every time he’s about to he makes me trade properties with him,” Momma adds. “And even though I’m on the brink of victory, he manages to destroy it so thoroughly that he loses again.”

“Hey, isn’t it time for a swap, there, luv?” Daddy asks Momma, smiling at her an’ blinkin’ a little, an’ Momma makes a ‘lectronic noise like she doesn’t really wanna but she does it anyways.

An’ we play it for a little while but I don’t think me an’ Daddy are winnin’ an’ after Momma tells us to go clean up my room so we go do that. Daddy helps me pick up my markers an’ put ‘em away an’ when we’re gonna go back to Momma I think of somethin’ I should tell him. “Daddy, thanks for stoppin’ me from ruinin’ the picture,” I tell him an’ I smile at him ‘cause ‘memberin’ that I made Momma proud is makin’ me really happy!   He smiles at me an’ rubs on top of me with his handle.

“Welcome, princess. If somethin’ about your mum confuses you, just come and ask me, alright? Sometimes she’s hard to figure out, I know, but give it a chance before you write her off, eh?”

“Yup!” I tell him, an’ we have a shoving fight all the way back to Momma.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> So I decided I needed another Caroline chapter and what happened is that we start to see Caroline lose a little of that innocent acceptance of GLaDOS. She still thinks GLaDOS is the shit, like the rest of us, but she’s starting to clue in on the fact that GLaDOS has problems. And it bothers her a lot, because those problems are really foreign to her and she genuinely does not understand some things and may never understand them. But she’s having trouble ACCEPTING GLaDOS’s problems, so she either gets angry or feels as though it’s her fault; everything was fine before, right?  
> I know Wheatley is getting upset a lot, but he’s getting frustrated because Caroline is getting older and yet she still hasn’t transferred some of that attachment to GLaDOS onto him. He feels as though he just happens to be there to fix things sometimes and he doesn’t like it.  
> GLaDOS is so clueless sometimes it kills me XD  
> Anyway, GLaDOS always forgets their anniversary and Wheatley always gets annoyed that she forgot. The reason being is that GLaDOS doesn’t understand why one day should be so special out of all the others, so she makes no effort to make it stand out. It’s not that she doesn’t care or that their anniversary means nothing to her, but it’s just not something that takes priority on her calendar.  
> Caroline thinks GLaDOS is talking in circles, but really GLaDOS can’t quite bring herself to say she was wrong. She was and she knows it, but she can’t say it. Caroline also thinks presents are for special occasions so she’s a little confused.


	39. Part Thirty-Nine.  The Adventure

**If anyone tried to read LaaC last night and saw that I accidentally added a chapter of Storytime with GLaDOS to it, please hit previous now and read Part Thirty-Eight first. Sorry about that.**

**Part Thirty-Nine. The Adventure**

 

Today I’m goin’ out by myself.

Usually Daddy comes with me when I go somewhere I never been before but today I’m gonna do it myself. I’m a little scared ‘cause this place is really big but I wanna start bein’ more grown up. I’m doin’ pretty good ‘cause now I can read and write and I can draw a little better, and I can even get my Edgeless Thingamabobs out when they get stuck without askin’ for help. So I’m gonna go in the facility. I dunno where I’m goin’ yet, but it’s gonna be somewhere I never been.

Part of why I’m doin’ it is ‘cause Momma gave me an update yesterday and she says I got my own camera now. And what I can do with it is take pictures of what I see! So I’m gonna go really far and take some pictures to show her. I hope she’ll be proud of me again.

I erase the picture I had on my panely – I mean my whiteboard, that’s what Momma said it was, and put the markers for it away. I’m really excited for my adventure but I’ve never really done anythin’ without tellin’ Momma before.   I mean she’ll always know where I am if she looks but I feel kinda diff’rent not actually _tellin’_ her. But Daddy and her don’t tell me everythin’ _they’re_ doin’ so I guess it’s okay.

I make sure everythin’s neat and tidy for when I come back and then I go down the hall. I’m goin’ a little slow ‘cause I still feel funny about not tellin’ anyone but the panels are here so someone does know, right?

The farther I go the older lookin’ stuff gets. It’s not really diff’rent from where I usually go otherwise. There’s lots of offices with computers and desks and windows in them. Some of the offices I go and look inside but they’re all the same. The only thing I can see through the windows is test chambers, but they’ve all got their lights off and the testing stuff is shut down. The one I’m lookin’ at now I think has the pellet-firing thingy and the thing that makes the blue swirly things. One day I wanna go in a test chamber and solve a test, but I haven’t asked Momma to yet ‘cause I dunno how you solve a test chamber without bein’ able to hold the portal gun. Also Momma won’ let me touch the portal gun so that makes it even harder. She said she’ll let me look at it when I’m old enough to understand what a black hole is. I’m gonna look it up in the database but I keep forgettin’. I really wanna look at one ‘cause they’re really pretty an’ Atlas has a blue one so I really wanna look at it. Momma has a portal gun too but I haven’t seen it. I just heard Momma and Daddy talkin’ about it one time. Momma was sayin’ that she thought it might be broken and it would be just like her to break it before she left, and Daddy started laughin’ and said she got the last word in, even though she was mute. I dunno who ‘her’ is. I haven’t seen anyone else here and the only other girl is P-Body, and she’s here so it can’t be _her_ portal gun. Plus she still has hers.

The farther I go the more lights are off, and I see some of Momma’s cam’ras but I think they’re turned off too ‘cause they’re facin’ the floor. I go up to one an’ look at the front of it. I don’t see the little red light on it so it’s gotta be off. Once I asked Momma why she has a little red light near her eye, and she told me it was because she makes a recordin’ of ev’rything she sees. She told me I couldn’ do that though because then I’d fill up my hard drive, which I need for other stuff like learnin’. So I gotta be careful when takin’ my pictures. I feel a little nervous again. Momma only turns off the cam’ras farthest from her chamber. So I’m gettin’ really far now.

I keep goin’ but a little slower. There aren’t a lot of panels here anymore. I can see this place and it looks kind of like an office but not like the ones where I just came from. The only problem is that the ceilin’ has a diff’rent kind of rail on it and I’m gonna have to leave the one I’m on to get there. I don’t know what I should do. I’ve never been off _this_ rail before. Is that rail safe? Maybe it’s not, since it’s stuck to the ceilin’ and all. But if it wasn’t safe, why would Momma leave it there?

Well, I _am_ on an adventure. And it’s not very adventurous if I just sit here all day. I’ll just be careful and I’ll make sure I can get back to _my_ rail. So I get a maintenance arm and I move myself to the other rail. It doesn’ creak or fall out of the ceilin’ or anythin’, so I guess it works okay. And I just got a message sayin’ I’m plugged in so it works with my battery too.

I go into the room and it’s kinda disappointin’ ‘cause all that’s in it is lots of chairs and another desk and a… I forget what it is. It makes pictures I think? If you put paper in it? Momma told me once but I can’t remember.

I keep goin’ through the room and it’s so borin’ that I wanna go back to my rail, but then I see somethin’ else outside the room and I decide I’ll go look at that first. And what I see is kinda cool! There’s these signs and they tell me how to make a batt’ry out of a potato! That makes me laugh ‘cause it’s kinda silly. ‘magine if I had a potato in me! Daddy took me to this room where Momma keeps all this stuff she has to fix and showed me what some of my insides look like. I have this green thing called a motherboard and the batt’ry is really really small. It’s just a small little circle and it has _much_ more power than this potato. This sign says… one point one volts. Yeah, my batt’ry’s _gotta_ be bigger than that.

There’s lots of potatoes but there’s also this thing that’s ‘pparently a volcano. I read that sign very carefully because it says stuff about chemical reactions and I know that’s Science and knowing Science is very important. Not just ‘cause Momma likes it but ‘cause if you don’t know Science you can’t fix stuff or build stuff and that is somethin’ everyone should know. I’m not sure how useful knowin’ about volcanoes is but maybe it’ll come in handy one day.

The last thing is – it’s amazin! It’s a _huge_ potato, and I can see its roots and everythin’! Wow! I wonder if Momma knows about this thing. I take a picture of it for her and try to read the sign but I can’t see it ‘cause the potato is too big. That’s kinda annoyin’. I wanna know why this one’s so big but the others are just tiny. And how come Momma doesn’t have any giant potatoes?

When I’m done lookin’ at it I go farther on the rail and I come to another place and there’s this really big thingy stickin’ out of the floor. That’s weird. I’m not sure what it is. It’s really big though. When I go up closer I can’t even see the bottom of it. It just goes into the facility farther than I can look. I shiver a little and pull myself together and move my handles closer to me. I don’t like this part of the facility. It’s too dark and weird and I can’t hear anythin’. There’s just a whooshin’ sound and sometimes some creakin’. And it’s cold. It’s colder’n anywhere else I ever been. I shoulda just gone to the greenhouse. It’s not really that fun to go on an adventure when it makes you all lonely. I wish I woulda brought Daddy with me.

I turn around and I go down to where I came from. I’m gonna go back now. I don’t like this anymore. But now I’m at the end of the rail here and it goes in two directions and I don’t remember which one I came from. I know there’s only two ways out of here but what if I pick the wrong one by accident? Then I’ll _really_ get lost! Right now I’m only _sorta_ lost, which is still scary but not as scary as bein’ _really_ lost! But I can’t just stay here! I gotta go _somewhere_!

I don’t know what to do. I can’t even move hardly an’ I think it’s gettin’ darker and colder. I look around and try to remember which way I came from on this rail but I can’t!

Oh wait! All I gotta do is call Momma. She’ll help me. She knows where I am. She always does. So I send her a message and then I wait. I hope she answers me quick. She always does but I really need her to be really fast right now. I want to go home.

She’s not answerin’. Momma’s not answerin’.

I gotta stay calm. I try real hard to and then I send her another one. I need her to tell me how to get out of here. Or send Daddy to come get me.

She’s still not answerin’.

Oh! I get hopeful ‘cause I just got two messages but now I’m readin’ ‘em and I just feel worse ‘cause they both say they’re unsent! But that means Momma can’t hear me!

If Momma can’t hear me and I can’t get out then I’m gonna be lost forever! What’m I gonna do? I can’t stay here forever!

Then my optic goes real small ‘cause I just heard a noise I never heard before. I dunno what’s goin’ on but there’s probably a monster behind me ‘cause Momma’s not here and it probably knows that and it’s gonna eat me. I didn’t believe about monsters before but now I think I do ‘cause I dunno what else that noise would be. Just me and Momma and Daddy and Atlas and P-Body live here. And Momma’s not here and if Momma’s not here this is probably where all the monsters in the facility live. And then I remember there really _are_ monsters here! The Mantis Men! The humans who put DNA in themselves and turned into monsters! I’m in big trouble now, I just _know_ it! I’m gonna have to run away and that’s gonna make me lost!

I don’t hear the noise anymore. Maybe I ‘magined it. Okay. I’m scared so I heard a noise that didn’t happen. And I’m gonna turn around and look and see nothin’ and then I don’t have to be scared of somethin’ I ‘magined.

Okay. I’m gonna be brave. I’m turnin’ around. I’m gonna see nothin’ ‘cause there’s nothin’ there.

Except there _is_ somethin’ there! There’s a _Mantis Man_ there and he’s gonna eat me! I can’t even think no more and all I can do is start screamin’! And I start shakin’ real bad and I’m tryin’ to get away but I can’t make myself move ‘cause I’m too scared!

The Mantis Man blinks at me and moves backward, and he starts scrunchin’ up his face. When I can stop screamin’ I say as brave as I can, “You better not eat me! My Momma won’t like it if you eat me! She’ll probably do some Science on you and you better not make her mad ‘cause Science is really powerful, you know!”

“ _Eat_ you?” the Mantis Man says, and his voice is quiet and kinda scratchy. That’s kinda weird ‘cause I woulda thought the voice of a Mantis Man would be real loud.

“You Mantis Men are really dang’rous,” I tell him, ‘cause I’m gonna let him know I know all about him and the kind of stuff he does. I dunno if that’ll stop him from eatin’ me but it’s the best I got right now. “So of _course_ you’re gonna eat me. But you better not. Or you’ll be in trouble.”

The Mantis Man frowns and folds his arms together. “Wait. I’ve never seen a core like you before. Where did you come from?”

“C-come from?” Why is the Mantis Man askin’ me questions before eatin’ me?

“Do you remember who made you?”

“Well yeah,” I tell him, and I’m not as scared and I dunno why but I think if he was gonna eat me he would’ve eaten me without talkin’ about it first. “My Momma made me.”

His eyes get real wide. “Your _mother_?”

“Yeah?” Unless Momma was lyin’ but she doesn’ lie to me. Not ever. “Don’t Mantis Men have Mommas?”

“I’m not a Mantis Man,” he says. “I’m a human.”

“Don’t be silly,” I tell him. “You’re too small to be a human. Humans are giant scary monsters an’ you’re smaller’n Atlas ‘n’ P-Body.”

He makes his frown again. “Who told you that?”

“Nobody. But humans aren’t very good. All the books I read they do bad stuff.” What I don’t get is why he hasn’t done any bad stuff yet. Is he waitin’ for more people to come or somethin’?

“What kinds of books are you reading?”

“Daddy calls ‘em fairy tales.”

“Hm,” he says, and he shrugs. “I guess you’re right, in that case. But I’m not going to hurt you. I won’t even touch you if that’s what you want. You’ve been sitting there staring for quite a while, though. I came to see if you were broken.”

“I don’t think so,” I tell him. “Somethin’ might be broken, though, ‘cause I was tryin’ to send a message to my Momma and it’s not sendin’.”

“This part of the facility isn’t in use anymore,” the human says. “It’s been shut down for a few years now. I’m glad of that, but I _have_ been wondering why. Where are you trying to go?”

“I wanna go home.” I’m gettin’ scared again. This human guy seems to be nice but I don’t wanna stay here talkin’ to him.

“Where is home?” he asks me real soft.

“With my Momma.”

“And where is she?”

“In her chamber.”

The human sticks his hands in his hair and messes it up a little. “You are kidding me.”

“I’m not jokin’,” I tell him real serious. “Home is my Momma’s chamber!”

“No, I…” He shakes his head. “I can’t believe this. She actually did it.”

“What’d who do?”

“Is your… father named Wheatley?”

I open my eye real wide. “How’d you guess?”

“I’ve met him.” He’s lookin’ at me serious now. “He told me his plans, but… I never thought such a thing would happen.   I never thought she would do it.”

“Who would do what?”

“I never thought she would agree to build you. Not you specifically, but at all.”

Oh I think I get it now. “You mean Momma?”

“…yes,” he says real slow.

“So if you know her you know how I can go home, right?”

“Possibly. I’ll have to look it up. Come with me.” He waves one of his hands at me and I follow him into a little office. It’s got a computer in it and he sits down and wiggles the mouse. “I’ll see if I can find a map for you.”

“Thanks,” I say a little shy. I guess humans aren’t that bad, right? ‘cause he’s helpin’ me and he doesn’t have to. “Can I ask you somethin’?”

“What?”

“Do humans have names?”

He looks up at me, and I think he’s surprised, and then he starts laughin’. “Don’t the humans in your books have names?”

“Yeah but I don’t trust ‘em ‘cause they’re names like Little Red Ridin’ Hood.”

He nods. “That’s true. Yes, we have names. I’m Doug.”

“Mine is Carrie,” I tell him and I feel a little shy again ‘cause I’ve never told anyone my name before. I don’t know if I did it right. He looks a little sad for some reason.

“That’s not… short for Caroline, is it?”

I’m about to ask him how he knows that when all of a sudden I realise somethin’! “Did you meet Momma’s friend, Doug?”

“Caroline? No. She was gone before I came here.” He’s typin’ a little on the keyboard. “I know who she was, but I never met her.”

“I wish I met Momma’s friend,” I say to Doug. “She gets sad if anyone even says my name so whoever Caroline is she’s gotta be real important.”

“Your… parents don’t say your name?” He looks up at me all confused again.

“Daddy calls me Carrie an’ Momma only calls me Caroline when she’s bein’ really serious.”

He stops his typin’ and then he turns his chair around so that he’s facin’ me. “How is she.”

“Momma? What d’you mean, how is she?”

“You know. Tell me how she’s doing. What you guys do. That sort of thing.”

“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, Doug,” I tell him, and I make a confused face but I don’t know if he understands what I look like.

“Tell me about your family,” he says. Okay. I think I can do that.

I tell him about Momma and Daddy and all the stuff we do, and when I tell him I can write his eyebrows move real quick so I have to stop and ask him why. “Robots don’t usually write,” he tells me. “But I shouldn’t be surprised, since she built you.”

“She said she was proud of me,” I say a little shy, ‘cause I don’t know if Momma would want me sayin’ that but it just makes me so happy to think of it and I’m even happier now that I can share it with someone. “She said what you just said, only she said somethin’ about fingers.”

Doug smiles. “She insists on using those claws, eh? She never changes.”

“She’s really stubborn,” I say, frownin’ a little. “I’m gonna be really stubborn too one day.”

That makes Doug laugh. “Oh no,” he says, and I think he looks really happy for some reason but I can’t figure out why. Then I notice his eyes look a bit weird.

“Hey, are your eyes broken?”

He shrugs. “Sort of. But it doesn’t really matter.”

“You’re still efficient even with your eyes broken?”

He narrows them a little bit and makes his mouth thinner. “That sounds so odd, coming from you.”

“What?”

“’Efficient’,” Doug says. “Children don’t usually know that word.”

“That word’s important,” I say to Doug. “If we aren’t efficient we’re gonna get hurt. And anyway. I’m not some dumb human kid.”

“That’s not a very nice thing to say,” he tells me really soft. I shrug.

“I looked up children in the database. When _they’re_ the same age as me they can barely do anythin’. They still can’t even talk right. And I know I don’t talk really well yet but I’m getting better.” I look at the floor.

“Do your parents talk about humans a lot?”

“No,” I answer. “Sometimes but not a lot and it’s usually about test subjects.”

“What about test subjects?”

“Just that Momma wants some. She doesn’t get to test anymore. I don’t know why Atlas and P-Body stopped but now they only use the test chambers for playin’ in.”

“She stopped testing.”

“You can’t test _robots_ ,” I tell him, ‘cause he’s bein’ silly. “You don’t get any _data_ if you do that.”

He looks up at me for a long time. Then he waves his hand at me. “Come here. I’ll show you where you need to go.”

I come over so I can look at his screen and he shows me where I got stuck. I’m s’posed to go left when I get there. Okay. I can remember that. He gets outta the chair and follows me out of the office. “What d’you do in here, Doug?” I ask him, tryin’ to go slow enough that he can keep up with me. “And how come Momma hasn’t got you to test for her?”

“She can’t test me,” Doug tells me, and he puts his hands inside the white thing he’s wearin’ on himself. “I have a mental disorder.”

“What does that mean?” I stop to look at him.

“It means… my brain doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to.” He smiles. “Testing me would provide very bad results.”

I start frownin’ at him. “You look like you’re workin’ fine. And if your brain don’t work why don’t you just ask Momma to fix it?”

“It can’t be fixed. It can only be patched.”

“ _Momma_ can fix it,” I tell him, comin’ closer and tryin’ to sound serious. I know Momma doesn’ like humans, but Doug is nice. I would still be lost and scared if he hadn’ helped me. “There’s nothin’ she can’t fix.”

He just smiles a little and doesn’t say anythin’. I start movin’ again. When we get to the spot where I got stuck I turn around again. “Thanks for helpin’ me, Doug,” I say as polite as I can. “It was nice of you not to eat me.”

“Most humans don’t eat robots.” He rubs one of his fingers on his nose. “No need to be afraid.”

“I wouldn’a been if I could call Momma,” I admit to him. “’cause she woulda scared the pants off you.” I frown a little bit. “I never screamed before. I been scared before, but I never been so surprised like I was when I saw you. But you’re not scary. Hey Doug? Are all humans like you?”

He looks not so happy all of a sudden, and he looks down. “… I wish I could say yes, but… no. There are bad humans and good humans, and there are some where it’s hard to tell which they are.”

“They should just all be good,” I say, and I swing back and forth a little. “Like robots!”

“You should get going,” Doug says, steppin’ backwards. “You’ve been here a long time.”

He’s right so I wave one of my handles at him. “Bye Doug! Don’t let the Mantis Men eat you!”

He smiles and waves one of his hands. “I’ll try.”

I put myself on the panels and I run to Momma’s chamber as fast as I can. And then I remember I’ve only got one picture to show her ‘cause I forgot to take more and that makes me a little mad at myself. I got almost lost for nothin’!

I feel much better about everythin’ when I finally get to Momma’s chamber, and I’m already tryin’ to figure out how I’m gonna tell her about my visit with Doug. Since Doug said Momma can’t test him I guess she already knows he’s there, right? I know she don’t like humans but if he’s here I guess he’s okay.

“Hi Momma!” I yell at her, an’ she looks up from the floor real fast. I still dunno how she moves so fast when she’s that big. Both me and Daddy are so slow sometimes compared to her.

“Where have you _been_.”

Uh oh.

I stop movin’ and suddenly I’m feelin’ a little scared again. She sounds mad. I didn’t do anythin’ wrong though, did I? She doesn’t know I got lost yet. I bet she’ll understand when I tell her. “Well I went on an adventure, Momma, to take pictures with my new cam’ra. But I wanted to go somewhere I never been, so I kept goin’ really far and I got lost.”

“You left the management rail.”

“I found another one! And I thought it was okay ‘cause if it wasn’ safe you wouldn’t have left it there, right?” Please don’t be mad no more, Momma!

“I left it there because I didn’t think anyone would ever go over there. I closed that part of the facility for a reason,” she says, and I can’t tell whether she’s still mad or not. “Don’t go out of range again. We’ve been looking all over for you. If you feel the irrational desire to head off into the depths of an unused laboratory, far out of range of communication, at least tell someone where you’re going. Wheatley’s been trying to find you for hours.”

“You don’t have to worry, Momma!” I tell her, feelin’ better ‘cause she sounds more annoyed than mad right now. “When I got lost this human came and he helped me!”

“What.”

Oh now she’s mad. Now she’s really really mad. I don’t know what I’m s’posed to say. I think if I talk more about Doug she’s gonna get madder, but if I don’t say anythin’ it’s gonna be the same. I never seen her so mad before. I guess that’s why we don’t talk about humans. I knew Momma didn’t like ‘em but –

“You’ve been talking to a human.” She comes t’wards me real slow and she’s starin’ at me and it feels kinda like she’s makin’ me stay still ‘cause her optic is so intense.

“I was lost, Momma, and I got scared and I couldn’ figure out where I was or move and he came to see if I was broken, and he was real helpful, Momma, he didn’ hurt me or touch me or do anythin’ –“

“Which would not have _happened_ if you’d used common sense and not gone somewhere _no one_ _could_ _find you_ ,” Momma snaps. “That was stupid. I thought you knew better than that.”

“He just helped me find how I was gonna get back, Momma. I only talked to him a little when he was findin’ it. And he wanted to know how you were, Momma! But I didn’ know what he meant so then I told him about all the stuff we do –“

“I cannot _believe_ this,” Momma says, interruptin’ me. “Have you learned _nothing_? You do _not_ go near humans. You do not _enlist_ human help. And you _do not talk to humans_! I don’t have a lot of rules, Caroline. You’re free to do as you please. But the _one_ thing you are not to do you go ahead and do.” She shakes her core. “Why do I bother telling you things. You obviously don’t listen to a word I say.”

“Momma, I do!” I shriek, ‘cause she’s bein’ a little scary now but I can’t imagine nothin’ scarier than her not talkin’ to me! “But I didn’t know what else to do and he – “

“If you had bothered to think, you might have figured it out. It seems you don’t do a whole lot of that. Hardly surprising, come to think of it. Considering.” She turns away from me. “I am _surrounded_ by thoughtless idiots.”

When she says that to Daddy she sounds like she’s teasin’ him but right now I think she actually means it. But I’m not, am I? I didn’t get lost on _purpose_!

“Gladys, that’s enough.”

I turn around and Daddy’s comin’ in behind me. I feel a little safer now. When Momma’s mad he always fixes it.

“I don’t think it is.”

“It was Doug, Gladys,” Daddy says real firm, and he stops right next to me. “You know Doug. You _trust_ Doug. Doug is here because, um, because you _let_ him stay here.”

“I don’t care who the hell it is!” Her voice gets louder and she’s starin’ at Daddy now. “I do not want her near humans!”

“She was lost and scared and, and she made a mistake,” Daddy says in a low way. “Don’t tell me you’ve uh, you’ve forgotten how that feels.”

“That has _no_ bearing on this,” Momma snaps, and her eye narrows a bit. “If she had used common sense in the _first_ place she would not have been lost to start with.”

“Carrie, you went there to take photos, is that right?” Daddy asks me, and he’s talkin’ softer to me than to Momma. I nod at him a little.

“There a particular reason, princess? Or were you just explorin’?”

“I wanted to take them for Momma,” I say but I’m really whisperin’. “She can’t come in the facility with me and I wanted to show her stuff that I saw.”

Daddy just looks at Momma. She doesn’t say anythin’ either and they just stare. After a long time Daddy says, “She got lost and needed help from Doug because she was thinking about you. I could be wrong, I know that, could be wrong, but I think she deserves a little slack. Then again, she’s just a kid tryin’ to explore, so it _could_ just be that you’re uh, that you’re making a huge thing out of uh, out of a kid making a mistake. Bit ridiculous if you ask me. How about you think on that for a bit, hm?” And then he comes in front of me and starts pushin’ on me. I turn around and start movin’ so he doesn’t have to push and we go to my room. He tells me to come off the rail and we sit on these little pillows Atlas ‘n’ P-Body gave me one time. I’m still scared and I’m really confused so I don’t say anythin’ because I don’t understand what happened. After a long time Daddy says quietly, “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“She was so mad,” I whisper at him. I think she can hear me in here and I don’t want to make her madder. Daddy moves to face me better.

“She’s not angry with you. She _is_ uh, she _is_ pretty angry, but um, but not with you. She’s just… she’s just taking it _out_ on you. Which… is not very nice of her. I thought we took care of that, but apparently not! Guess it was too much to hope. But princess,” he tells me, and I don’t think I ever heard him so serious, “don’t take what happened today… don’t uh… don’t let it bother you, alright? She didn’t mean any of that. Promise. You’re not an idiot, and you’ve common sense. Just try not to do it again, alright?”

“But he was _nice_ to me, Daddy,” I tell him, and I feel better ‘cause Daddy would know if Momma was really bein’ mean or not. “Why do I gotta stay away from nice people?”

“She just wants what’s best for you, princess,” he says, and he rubs the top of me. “Go to sleep now, alright?”

I start frownin’. “But –“

“I think your mum needs a little more time to think.”

But I don’t go to sleep and when I think Daddy’s sleepin’ I get off my pillow and go out of my room. I ain’t sleepin’, not with Momma super mad like that. I’m startin’ to feel scared again but I’m gonna be brave. I was supposed to be brave earlier but I kinda wasn’t so here goes.

When I peek in her chamber I get a bit surprised ‘cause she’s pushin’ her core into a floor panel she brought up and I think she’s talkin’ to herself in bin’ry. I think she’s still mad. That’s a long time to be mad though. I mean all I gotta do is throw some stuff through portals and then I’m okay.

Hey. Wait. How do you stop bein’ mad if you don’t got stuff to throw? Well Momma’s _got_ stuff to throw I guess but I dunno why she ain’t throwin’ it. She probably wouldn’ be mad anymore if she did. And if she did that she wouldn’t have to yell! Maybe I can try to tell her that. If she’s gonna listen. She might start yellin’ at me again. I pretend to take a breath like I seen Daddy do sometimes and I’m about go in when I think of somethin’.

Momma tries to stop bein’ mad by throwin’ _words_!

I gotta stop and think about that for a minute. Daddy said Momma wasn’t mad at me, not really, but she was takin’ it out on me. So Momma was mad but she had to throw some words but I was the only one to throw ‘em at. And now she’s… I guess she’s throwin’ ‘em at the panel? I hope the panels don’t mind that. But now I know what she’s doin’ so I don’t gotta be scared if she starts yellin’. She’s tryin’ to stop bein’ mad and she’s not bein’ very nice about it but I guess sometimes you do what you gotta to calm yourself down.

Okay that was good that I figured that out. I’m nervous but not scared. So now I keep goin’ and when I’m about two panels away from her I put on my best soft voice, the one where I try to sound like Momma when she’s helpin’ me, and I say, “Hi Momma.”

She comes up really fast again like before and she stares at me. I think Momma’s really pretty the way she is but when I’m tryin’ to figure out what she’s thinkin’ I wish she had an eye like me. If I’m lookin’ at Daddy I can see whether he’s mad or sad or anythin’ else, but if Momma’s starin’ at me I just don’t know. “What are you doing here,” she says and her voice is really flat.

“I want you to stop bein’ mad,” I say. “You’re hurtin’ my feelin’s by sayin’ stuff you don’t even mean and you gotta stop ‘cause you’re not bein’ nice.”

“So the humans are nicer than me. Is that it?” I never heard her sound so harsh before. She’s not yellin’ but it’s a little scary anyway.

“I don’t know what you got mad about, Momma,” I say to her. “I guess I shoulda told you where I was goin’ but I wanted it to be a surprise! And Doug was nice to me. He was worryin’ about me and he didn’t even know who I was.”

“I have my reasons for wanting you to keep away from them,” Momma says, and she sounds a little mad but not as much. “It doesn’t matter if they’re nice to you once. That does not say anything about them as a whole.”

“But you know that human. Don’t you?”

“I know him. But you do not. I know to what extent he can be trusted. You got lucky. Next time may be a little less unfortunate.”

“Okay, Momma.” If I see another human I won’t talk to him. I’ll spy on him instead, maybe. Then I can tell Momma about him and then maybe she’ll let me talk to him.

“Go back to your room. Wheatley’s going to be wondering where you went.”

“Sure,” I say, and even though she doesn’t sound too happy she doesn’t seem mad anymore. And I’m almost gone when I remember somethin’! “Wait, Momma! I got somethin’ for you!”

“What?”

“I’m gonna send it.” And I find the picture of the potato tree thingy on my hard drive and I send it to her. I know she got it when she looks up a little bit so I start leavin’ again.

“Wait.”

So I go back to facin’ her and actually I think that lookin’ at the picture stopped her from bein’ mad. I dunno why. “Yeah?”

“I changed my mind. You can stay here if you want.”

“I do!” I say excitedly ‘cause I’ve been away from Momma all day. So I zoom back to her and when she lies down I cuddle her. I guess she’s still a little mad ‘cause she doesn’t cuddle me back but that’s okay ‘cause I get to stay here. And I’m listenin’ to Momma’s brain goin’ and gettin’ that nice feelin’ of bein’ cozy that I get when I sit right next to her, and she says, “Caroline.”

“Mmhm?”

“I didn’t mean any of what I said. You know that.”

She sounds really tired. I guess maybe I’d be tired if I was worried about me all day and then I got really mad ‘cause bein’ mad is really tiring. “I do, Momma. But maybe you could throw somethin’ else instead of words, okay?”

“What are you _talking_ about?”

“When you’re mad you start yellin’. When I get mad I go throw stuff. But I ain’t hittin’ anyone with the Edgeless Thingamabobs and you’re hittin’ people with your words. Even if you didn’t mean it, it didn’t stop it from hurtin’.”

Momma stays quiet and I hope she’s thinkin’ that over.

“It wasn’t right to yell at you,” Momma says, in my favourite soft voice. “And I know right now you won’t understand. But I yelled at you because you’re my baby, and you always will be.”

“I like bein’ your baby, Momma,” I say and I wiggle a little bit. “But I don’t like your yellin’. So can I be your baby without the yellin’ please?”

“I’ll try. I don’t _like_ yelling at you, but… I don’t know what else to do, sometimes.”

“Try talkin’?” I say and my voice goes up a bit at the end but I don’t know why. “I like talkin’.”

“Oh, I know,” Momma says in one of her dry voices, and then I giggle ‘cause she’s teasin’ me for talkin’ a lot. And then she nudges me and I have to smile ‘cause I was waitin’ for that! “Why don’t you try shutting up long enough to go to sleep.”

“How about I don’t?” I say and I try to make it sound like I’m playin’.

“You’re going to have to. If you don’t sleep, I won’t sleep, and I’m not going to be very fun tomorrow if that happens.”

“We’re gonna do somethin’ fun tomorrow?” I shriek.

“That’s… not what I meant, but all right. I’ll think of something.”

And I was gonna go to sleep, I really was, but then I thought of somethin’ and I say, “Momma?”

“Is this the last question?”

“Okay.” I gotta let Momma sleep, so it really has to be.

“What.”

“Momma, can… can you promise not to yell at me?” That would be nice ‘cause that’d solve _that_ problem. Momma never, ever breaks a promise. But she’s bein’ real quiet and I dunno if she’s gonna do it.

“I promise not to yell at you,” she says softly, and I know I’m s’posed to go to sleep but I gotta shove on her ‘cause I’m so happy to hear that. “No more questions. Go to sleep.”

That’s not too hard ‘cause Momma is cozy and my clock says it’s really past when I usually sleep. And I tell her, “Goodnight, Momma!” and close my eye real tight.

“Goodnight, Caroline.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> I bet you’re all thinking how original that chapter was, what with me having another core meet Doug. Well, it wasn’t that original. But it was important. Here’s why.  
> Some of you might be thinking that what Carrie said about Science and a couple of the things she says to Doug are a bit weird. But she’s AI. She’s going to think a little different from a human child.   
> She lost contact with GLaDOS from a combination of GLaDOS having disconnected that rail from her surveillance network (that part of the facility is shut down) and because Carrie is out of wireless range. Yes, GLaDOS knows Doug is there doing maintenance, but she doesn’t talk to him because while he trusts her as much as he can, he’s still schizophrenic and she’s not bothering him out of respect.   
> What GLaDOS is doing with the core-against-the-panel thing is like you know when you’re mad and you just press your face into the wall or maybe your hands into your face and just sorta make growly noises (or maybe that’s just me)? That’s what she’s doing. She has no one to yell at so she doesn’t know how to get rid of the anger. Well she’s actually talking to herself but that’s besides the point.  
> You know how parents will sometimes dislike a certain group of people? They’ll be like, don’t go near them. They’re trouble, they’re this they’re that, etc. And then you hang out with them and you’re like yo mom yo dad I don’t get why you don’t like these people. That’s what happened. This is going to matter later in the story. GLaDOS’s first experiences with humans were terrible, but Carrie believes they’re just as good as robots.  
> The real reason GLaDOS flips is that she was trying to raise Carrie without human influence. It’s not that she WANTS Carrie to think that humans are bad, but GLaDOS believes that human contact is damaging. So she got angry because now Carrie HAS spoken to a human, and she believes that Carrie’s newfound trust in humans (because Doug was nice to her, she trusts him) will hurt her later on.   
> GLaDOS changed her mind because seeing the potato reminded her of how she felt to be able to trust a human. She still doesn’t like that Carrie did it, but she’s a little more understanding.


	40. Part Forty.  The Chassis

**Part Forty. The Chassis**

 

It was a good thing Caroline was as stubborn as her mum, Wheatley mused to himself as he made the trek from her room to GLaDOS’s chamber. He’d woken up in the middle of the night, as usual, and upon noticing Caroline’s absence known exactly what had happened. And he was glad of it. He’d not spent a night away from GLaDOS since that one nasty fight they’d had and he had no intention of ever doing it again. He took his place next to GLaDOS’s core and nestled into her contentedly. Much better. The pillow was better than just sitting on the floor, but it was cold and quiet and unfamiliar. Honestly if he’d been incapable of just popping into sleep mode he’d’ve just sat there until Carrie had left anyway!

“What _took_ you?” GLaDOS somehow snapped quietly, and Wheatley jumped as his optic snapped open. He turned to look at her, plates narrowing confusedly.

“Why’re you still up?”

“Don’t tell me you seriously don’t know.”

After a little bit of confused thought he remembered the last time they’d been separated at night. _Neither_ of them had slept well, now that he thought of it. He smiled a little sheepishly and looked down at the floor. “I uh, I guess I should’ve figured that out, yeah.”

“Figure it out faster next time. I’m exhausted.”

Wheatley frowned. It was _her_ fault he’d left in the first place! He almost sent the words to his vocabulator to articulate this when he realised it was probably not the best idea to start an argument just then. He didn’t want to wait, but it’d be better. She’d be a bit more receptive after she’d had time to stop thinking about being angry.

 

She was snappy and irritated the next morning, however, and Wheatley wasn’t feeling quite as upset about it, so he kept quiet. Apparently she’d told Caroline they were going to do something, but as much as he understood her enthusiasm he knew it was in everyone’s best interest for him to take the little core someplace else. She was far too excited to care about that, though, and for the morning and half that afternoon Wheatley took her for a walk, kind of, through those bits of the facility she wanted to see that were off the beaten track, as it were. She was frightened at first, of what Wheatley wasn’t sure. He knew she wasn’t afraid of meeting Doug again, but it was odd that she would fear getting lost when he was right there. That seemed to be it, though, because she kept looking behind her. To be sure, he asked her, and she told him that she was afraid because she was out of range.

“But I’m right here,” Wheatley said, confused.

She looked at the floor tiles and bounced her handles a little. “I know.”

“Then what is it?”

“I woulda been okay yesterday,” she mumbled, “but Momma couldn’t hear me.”

Wheatley tried really hard not to be offended. He tried really hard not to be upset, and he tried really, really hard to fight off the hurt. But he couldn’t. He told her he thought it was time they headed back and left her to do whatever she felt like doing in her room. He went to his hole and stared glumly out at the vibrant blue sky.

Wheatley knew he was not the most capable person ever made. He knew he was, at his core, a screwup. He’d accepted that. There was no point in denying who you were, after all. It was better just to accept it and head on with your life. But the _one_ thing Wheatley did his damnedest to do well was raise Caroline. He was always thinking of her, always watching out for her, always trying his best to think of how he could be a better dad.

It never mattered.

Caroline always ran to GLaDOS. She always wanted GLaDOS’s attention and approval, never Wheatley’s. He almost felt like he was invisible, sometimes. And used. Caroline only turned to Wheatley when GLaDOS wasn’t available or when she was too much for Caroline to handle. He bounced his lower handle in frustration. Seriously. Was it his lot in life to always be second best? He wasn’t doing anything _wrong_ by Caroline, was he? He was patient. He always listened and tried hard to advise her in a useful way. But it wasn’t enough, because he didn’t carry the _authority_ that GLaDOS did, the _gravitas_ , that indescribable _thing_ that _drew_ her to her mum as if by an invisible force! Whatever it was, Wheatley didn’t have it. And he wanted it, wanted it desperately, but he did not know what it was so he couldn’t even _begin_ to work towards it. And the more he thought about it, the more spiteful he felt, so that by the time the sun had faded and his system was having trouble deciding on which exposure to receive the visual data with he was quite a lot angrier than he’d been in a while.

When he returned to GLaDOS’s chamber, Caroline was playing with some apparatus he’d never seen before. It seemed to be a very long slide of some sort, where she put tiny little balls at the top and had them roll down to the bottom. She seemed quite enamoured with it, giggling when some part at the bottom collapsed and she had to trap the little balls with her maintenance arm, but GLaDOS, as per usual, was not participating. This only irritated Wheatley more. _He_ always played _with_ Caroline. Not just sat there _staring_ until she got bored.

“Wanna play, Daddy?” Caroline asked, unsuccessfully waving at him with the maintenance arm and scattering her apparatus all over the floor. GLaDOS looked at the mess cursorily but otherwise didn’t even move. Wheatley heroically did not glare indignantly at GLaDOS on his way over to Caroline, though he sorely wanted to. But he knew Caroline hated it when they fought, and while they were actually overdue for an argument, he didn’t feel like starting one right now. What even would the point be? GLaDOS always won.

Caroline grew tired before too long and Wheatley quite helpfully volunteered to pick up for her, to which she happily agreed. After he’d finished he considered forgoing his usual spot to snuggle Caroline instead, but again he decided he didn’t want to deal with the consequences. And because he was such a good – a good – he didn’t actually know _what_ he was, since he was pretty sure there was some word other than _friend_ to describe his relationship with GLaDOS, though he was a bit iffy on _boyfriend_. But anyway. Because he was so spectacular at _that_ , he settled himself beside her and glared at the floor. When she did not make any attempt to communicate, let alone acknowledge that he existed, he said, in as neutral a tone as possible, “How’s your day gone?”

“Fine,” GLaDOS answered. “Just working.”

“On what?” Wheatley asked, pretending he cared. Okay, well, he sort of did, but right now he was trying to be aloof and – and – self-righteous, so he couldn’t _act_ like he cared.

“That thing I can’t talk about.”

“Quite the project, isn’t it?” Wheatley pressed, because hearing that only made him more irritated. She always had to be so _mysterious_ and _secretive_.

“If I didn’t have to do it, I wouldn’t be.”

“I’m sure you could figure something out if you really wanted to,” Wheatley snapped, unable to contain his frustration any longer. GLaDOS sighed.

“We’ve already been _over_ this. _Thinking_ about it is a huge risk in itself. Now stop. Asking.”

 _Fine then_ , Wheatley thought to himself, frowning hard at the floor. _I won’t care about your life. I won’t ask about it and, and I won’t even_ think _about what you’ve been doing. Other than right now, because now I’m sort of… stuck thinking about it. But later I won’t. Just like you don’t care about what_ I’ve _been doing._

 

 

 

Now Wheatley was getting a bit scared.

Every now and again, he’d be playing with Caroline and she’d just shut down. No warning, she wasn’t tired. She just shut off, and Wheatley would stare at her worriedly until she came back online, and oddly enough she didn’t seem to realise what was going on. She just cheerfully went back to what they were doing. He debated whether or not to tell GLaDOS, because she probably already knew, and if she didn’t, well, there was probably a reason. But eventually he couldn’t stand it anymore and went to ask her about it. Even though he was still angry with her, Caroline was a much higher priority than maintaining his distance.

“Yes, I know,” GLaDOS told him, looking up from one of her monitors. “I’m working on it. She just needs moved to the newer chassis. It’s a bit earlier than… no. No, that’s… not true.” She shifted uneasily, looking back at her monitor. “I just… didn’t want this day to come.”

“What day, luv?” He was concerned at her uncharacteristic uncertainty, though he was pleased she had stopped herself before she’d lied. He was having trouble holding onto his anger now, though. “And what’s going on with her? Is she broken?

“No. Her hard drive is at capacity.”

“And… the new one’s not ready?”

GLaDOS shook her head. “No. It’s ready.”

“D’you think something bad’s gonna happen if you put her in the new one?” Wheatley asked in a hushed voice.

“Do you remember being young, Wheatley?” GLaDOS asked quietly.

“A little.”

“It doesn’t last long, does it.”

“No,” Wheatley said, realisation dawning on him. “And… she’s been like this a long time.”

“That’s right. I shouldn’t have done it, but I was a bit more… _lenient_ with the updates than I should have been.” Her chassis sank a little. “I was trying to draw it out, you see. And it lasted three years. But she’s outgrown that chassis, so to speak. I can’t draw out the updates anymore. The last set is one package. So after she’s reinstalled in the new chassis, she’s going to… age, I suppose you could say. She’ll have everything she needs for full sentience and autonomy, just as we did. She won’t be as she is for much longer.”

“So,” Wheatley said, thinking hard, “you’re saying she’s not supposed to have been like this for this long. She should have, should have become like us earlier. But you held off. So she’s just hitting that point now.”

“That’s right.” She was staring pensively at the monitor. “As I mentioned. I shouldn’t have done that. But I was selfish.”

“How?”

“I wasn’t ready,” GLaDOS answered softly, looking at the floor. “I’m… still not.”

“Is she going to change that much?”

“She’s going to grow up, Wheatley.” GLaDOS laughed bitterly. “Don’t we all change a lot when we grow up?”

“Well… she’ll still be her,” Wheatley said, a little confused as to what GLaDOS was so upset about.

“Maybe. Some people don’t change at all when they age. Some people change a lot. I know I did.”

“It’ll be okay, luv.” He went up close to her, looking down at her concernedly. “Even if she goes through a lot of change, I suppose, well, long’s we don’t she’ll, she’ll still have something to uh, to… to steady herself against, I s’pose.”

“I know. I just…” She shook her head again. “I suppose I’m just… going to miss this part.”

“So’m I,” Wheatley told her. “But it’ll be neat to have her grown up with us too, right?”

“I suppose,” GLaDOS said, though she didn’t sound convinced. “Go and get her and I’ll get this over with.”

Wheatley did as he was asked and retrieved Caroline from whatever game she’d been playing with Atlas and P-body. She was rather more excited than he’d seen her in a while, but she always did get excited when GLaDOS wanted her for something. The frustration flared in him again but he forced it back. He would have to work that out later.

“Hi Momma!” she called out cheerfully, and GLaDOS looked up at her.

“Hello.”

“Whatcha doin’?” Caroline asked, looking up at GLaDOS’s monitor.

“What we’re going to do,” GLaDOS told her seriously, “is move you into a new chassis.”

“You’re gonna give me a new body?” she gasped, staring at GLaDOS with a wide optic.

“That’s right,” GLaDOS answered. “And you won’t shut down spontaneously anymore.”

“Huh?” she asked, turning to Wheatley.

“You won’t uh, you won’t fall asleep all the time,” he told her.

“Ooh,” Caroline squealed, facing GLaDOS again. “An’ all you gotta do is stick me in there?”

“Yes.”

Wheatley leaned around Caroline to see that GLaDOS had brought out another Core similar to the one Caroline already had, but about twice the size. It was still not as big as Wheatley’s, but he figured it might be that Moore’s Law thing that GLaDOS had mentioned a while back and decided not to ask.

“I’m going to put you to sleep,” GLaDOS went on. “You’ll wake up in a few minutes.”

“Okay!” Caroline dutifully faced herself towards the floor, and within a few minutes her chassis had gone completely silent.

“This is going to take a while,” GLaDOS said to Wheatley, glancing at him. “To make things as easy as possible for her, I had to make an image, which I now have to install on the new hard drive. I don’t know how long that’s going to take.”

“I… I’ll wait here, with you,” Wheatley said quietly. He felt oddly nervous, now that Caroline was gone.

“She’ll be back soon,” GLaDOS said gently. “Just the same as she was five minutes ago.”

“And the change will come after.”

“Yes.”

GLaDOS returned to whatever she’d been working on, and Wheatley just sat nearby and waited. After a while, GLaDOS said, “Wheatley.”

“Mm?” He looked up, concerned despite himself. He almost thought there was a…. a _rawness_ , sort of, to her voice. Which was quite odd and quite rare.

She lifted her core so that she could see him. “I’m not completely oblivious. I know you’re upset about how she feels about me. Well. I haven’t done anything about it because everything is about to change.”

“What d’you mean?” Wheatley asked, feeling a bit panicked. Everything was about to change just because Caroline had a new chassis? Was that even _possible_?

“Caroline… is not going to listen to everything I say unconditionally, now,” GLaDOS said. “Right now, she doesn’t understand why I do what I do and she doesn’t really want to. But that’s about to change. She’s going to start questioning me and my behaviour, and I’m not going to have any answers that will satisfy her.”

“Not… not sure I understand you there, luv,” Wheatley said weakly.

“If I tell her I’m working, that usually satisfies her, right? She’s not too happy about it, but she listens. In the future, she’s going to question that. She’s going to have a hard time believing I really have that much work to do. Which I do. I’m not making it up. But she’s going to _think_ I am.” She looked a bit pensively at the floor. “A lot of what I do isn’t… concrete. That is, I can’t actually _demonstrate_ that I’ve done it. I can’t show her updates to the facility that I make, for example, or other assorted changes. She’s going to want me to _prove_ what I’m doing, and honestly I won’t blame her. But the fact that I can’t is going to bring change.”

“Like… like what.”

“She’s not going to trust my judgement anymore,” GLaDOS said quietly. “She’s going to start second-guessing me.”

“How d’you even _know_ this’ll happen?” Wheatley protested, moving a little closer. “Are you sure you’re not, I dunno, just completely off with this uh, this _estimate_ , that you’re making?”

“I know it will happen because it’s what I would do,” GLaDOS answered. “It’s what I _did_ do, a long time ago.”

“She’s not you.”

“She’s not you either.” She lowered her core. “Which is regrettable, because you’re… the only person who has ever accepted me. There’s no guarantee she will in the future.”

“So you’re saying,” Wheatley said, trying to gather all of it up in his brain so he could examine it better and, “is that she’s going to do what you would do and, and just totally uh, just completely –“

“Question authority,” GLaDOS interrupted. “Right now, I’m the authority. The older one gets, the more one tends to question it. The more things are seen erroneous about it. She’s going to begin questioning me, my authority, and whatever else now that causes her to prefer me over you, and that is when she will turn away from me.”

“Where’s she going to –“ He caught himself before he asked a really stupid question. “Oh.”

“That’s right,” GLaDOS nodded. “She’s going to go to you now. She’s going to question me and she’s going to expect answers from you. It doesn’t really matter if your answers are correct, or even if they exist. She’s just going to want commiseration out of you, really.”       

“So… so what you are to her, right now,” Wheatley said, “is what… what I’m going to be later.”

“Yes.”

It was exactly what he’d been wanting so much for the last little while, but… now that he was being faced with having to _do_ it, he really didn’t want to. Of course it was kind of frustrating when Caroline went to GLaDOS for everything, even when it was GLaDOS’s fault and Wheatley was trying to sort things out, but… he didn’t even _know_ if he could be that person! And God, now that he thought of it, it was so much _responsibility_! He’d never done well with responsibility, and if he screwed any of this up… well, he couldn’t even _imagine_ the consequences, they were so huge. “Are you… are you quite sure this is going to happen?” he asked timidly.

“Unfortunately, yes,” GLaDOS answered. “It’s going to happen.”

“And are you going to um… to help me with this, at all? I mean… advise me, or something?”

“It’s probably best I don’t. She’s not going to trust your judgement either if she discovers any of what you say comes from me, which is only going to cause her to be more vindictive towards me. I’d rather not deal with that.”

“But… but I can’t!” Wheatley cried out. “I can’t – can’t –“

“Of course you can be her parent,” GLaDOS said softly. “You’re just going to have to be a little more serious about it, that’s all.”

“What if I screw this up!”

“I already know you’re going to screw it up. But I can’t prevent it, so go ahead.”

“Gladys!”

“I’m not abandoning you to this by yourself,” she relented, looking away again. “I’m just not certain what my role is going to be.”

“But you’ll… you’ll help me, right? If you can?” It didn’t really matter whether it was true or not, but he needed her to say yes. Thankfully, she nodded.

“This is a two-person endeavour. I’m not going to leave you to it on your own.”

He sidled up to her so that maybe he could sneak in a snuggle if she wasn’t paying attention; something inside him was cold and scared and anxious. He honestly wasn’t sure he could handle that after all. Yes, he’d been quite jealous, but he’d never actually thought about all the work it would involve. All the risk, and all the potential for failure. Now that he’d actually have to _do_ what GLaDOS’d been doing, he was terrified.

“In all seriousness, Wheatley,” she went on, indeed sounding quite serious, “I don’t think it will last forever. It’s going to take a while, but eventually she will come full circle. Though then it will be because she _does_ understand, whereas now she doesn’t care to.”

“So it’s like… like there’s three phases, sort of,” Wheatley thought aloud. “There’s the… the not understanding, because she doesn’t want to, and then the uh… then the not understanding, because um…”

“Because it doesn’t make sense.”

“Alright, and then there’s um, then there’s understanding because… it _does_ make sense?” he guessed.

“That’s right.”

“And… how long’s that um… that going to take, d’you think?”

GLaDOS shook her core. “If I knew I would have told you.”

“I dunno if I can do this.”

“You can,” GLaDOS said calmly. “You’re not going to like some of it, but you can.”

“You didn’t even insult me that time,” said Wheatley, his voice small. GLaDOS laughed.

“I didn’t realise you enjoyed it so much. I’ll try harder next time.”

“Gladys, I just… if I… if I mess this up, will… will she hate you forever?”

“Ultimately, that’s her decision. All you’ll be doing is guiding her, as I’ve been doing. If she decides she still hates me after she no longer needs that guidance, well, I’ve been hated before.” She sounded flippant, but Wheatley could just hear the thread of anxiety underneath. She didn’t _want_ it to happen, but she didn’t know how to prevent it from happening.

“But I’m tired of discussing this. Change the subject. You’re good at that.”

He stammered a little bit at that, not realising that was a _talent_ instead of an annoyance, which made her laugh again.

“I can’t make conversation out of indecipherable noises. You’re going to have to do better than that.”

They ended up discussing whether or not she should repurpose the turrets, seeing as most of them had been sitting in storage for years now. She was half for and half against the idea, the against bit mostly being her natural discontent at testing apparatus not being used for testing. But they weren’t actually being used for testing _anyway_ , Wheatley did his best to argue, though since GLaDOS did most of the work of the facility there really wasn’t anything to do with the turrets other than leave them in storage, which GLaDOS also didn’t like because she hadn’t built them to keep them in storage. Wheatley was about to suggest asking the co-op bots for their opinion when Caroline’s hard drive finally slowed down. Wheatley felt that coldness come back, and he looked at GLaDOS nervously.

“It’s not going to happen immediately, idiot,” she told him in as kindly a way as something like that could be said. “It’s going to creep up on you.”

“Even better,” Wheatley muttered, and GLaDOS snickered.

“It’ll be like a surprise. You’re fond of those.”

“Not terrifying, life-shattering surprises, I’m not. I like _nice_ surprises.”

“We’re out of those. We ran out fifty years ago.”

“You didn’t even _exist_ fifty years ago!”

“I existed in spirit,” GLaDOS said sagely, and Wheatley stared at her a bit incredulously. That was a bit philosophical, coming from her.

“What does that even bloody _mean_?”

“Science,” was all she said.

Before Wheatley could get too annoyed with her for answering a question with ‘science’ again, Caroline’s optic snapped open and she stared at the two of them for a long moment. Then she looked around in a panicked sort of way and clenched into herself.

“What is it?” Wheatley asked, alarmed.

“I don’t like it,” Caroline said, shivering a little. “I don’t like this chassis, Momma. I wanna go back to my old one.”

“You can’t,” GLaDOS said gently. “There’s no going back.”

“I don’t like it!” Caroline protested. “It’s too big and there’s too much stuff in here and I don’t feel right and I want to go back!”

“You can’t,” GLaDOS repeated. “You’ll get used to it.”

“No I won’t!” she shrieked. “I can’t get used to somethin’ like this! You gotta put me back!”

“I can’t put you back,” said GLaDOS. “That’s you, now.”

“Momma, you have to!”

“Your time in that chassis is over.” GLaDOS’s voice was far more firm than Wheatley’s ever would have been. He didn’t know what to do. Caroline was far more distraught than he knew how to deal with… and in the future, he was going to _have_ to deal with it.

The thought was terrifying.

“It’s time for you to grow up.”

Caroline stared at GLaDOS.

“I don’t think I wanna be grown up anymore,” she said in a very small voice, and without warning buried her optic in GLaDOS’s core and started to cry.

Wheatley watched helplessly. There was nothing he could do, and honestly he wasn’t sure he _wanted_ to do anything. And as a matter of fact… he and Caroline were both in much the same situation. They were both going to have to grow up a little in order to deal with the future, and honestly he was just as scared as she was. The world seemed so much _bigger_ now, so much more _unknowable_ and _foreboding_. Was that the world as GLaDOS saw it? And if it was, how did she go _on_ every day? How did the world not crush her, like it felt as though it were doing to Wheatley right now? And poor little Caroline as well!

He waited for GLaDOS to poke fun at what Caroline had said, to remind her of all the times she had _wanted_ to be grown up, or one of the other many remarks she made at such times, but she didn’t.

It seemed as though GLaDOS no more knew what to do than Wheatley did. Okay, she _probably_ had a plan, but she was taking her time in carrying it out.

Caroline eventually calmed down and turned around a little so that she was facing GLaDOS’s chassis, but she still looked terribly sad. “I’m really scared, Momma,” she said, very quietly.

“Nothing has changed,” GLaDOS told her. “You have full functionality now. That’s it. I’m not sending you out into the facility on your own. You just have more capabilities than you used to.”

“There’s too _many_ capabilities!” Caroline protested. “How’m I supposed to pick which ones I use?”

“You have to decide that on your own.”

“I can’t, Momma.”

“You don’t have to do it right now. You have lots of time. I know this is going to sound insane, but you’re actually going to _want_ to eventually. There’s no need to be afraid.”

There wasn’t? Because Wheatley was pretty sure being responsible for Caroline for the next three years was something to be pretty bloody scared about.

The time for sleep mode came and went, but GLaDOS did not mention it. She merely dissuaded Caroline’s fears one by one with a quite frankly _very_ impressive calm, and even though she was paying zero attention to Wheatley whatsoever he felt a little bit better as well. He was so envious of GLaDOS just then, he really was. Her ability to explain away anything with logic was astounding. When she’d finally said enough to Caroline so that she finally _did_ sleep, though, he was again feeling a bit panicked. “Gladys, what you said, I… it _can’t_ come true,” he said, looking at her worriedly. “I can’t… can’t do what you just did. Can’t. Please, I… you’ve gotta be wrong, luv. It’s not gonna happen.”

“I think you’ll find,” GLaDOS said tiredly, “that when it happens you’ll come up with something. That being said, I really do not have the energy to console you right now. It’s going to have to wait. Or maybe you could be an adult and sort it out yourself.”

Wheatley looked silently at the floor.

“I’m sorry.” He looked up upon hearing the softness of her voice. “That was… uncalled for.”

“This has been the _worst_ day,” Wheatley said heavily. “And it’s going to get worse. Great. Just bloody wonderful.”

“You’re not going to be anymore alone than she will. I’m still _here_.”

“Kinda hard to miss,” Wheatley joked a little weakly. GLaDOS turned to face him, sliding her faceplate down to glare up at him with That Look. It was actually very funny when she gave him That Look because she was trying to be intimidating but she was actually being adorable. He was cheered up upon seeing that.

“You’re so observant,” GLaDOS remarked dryly. “I don’t know _how_ I neglected to notice that. You should have told me sooner.”

“Maybe you’re running out of um, running out of mem’ry,” he suggested as she returned to her former position.

“If ever the hilariously unlikely probability that I was going to run out of memory came up, I would merely make more. I have an infinitely large memory. Unlike you, the contents of which I could write to a green bean.”

He had no doubts that she actually could write someone’s memory to a green bean, but he asked, “Wouldn’t it uh, wouldn’t my mem’ry be lost when um, when the green bean uh… died?”

“There’s something in your memory worth keeping?”

“You,” he whispered into the side of her core, and though she tried to pretend that didn’t affect her whatsoever he clearly heard her fans react to that statement.

“I’m sure you would… fill that tiny space up with something. Probably moth balls.”

“I would see _you_ long before I found any um, located any… any dust to put in there,” he answered, a little less suavely than he’d meant, but it was still quite satisfactory to hear her react a second time.  

“I’m sure you’d manage to screw that up, despite my obviousness.”

And this, Wheatley realised, was something he would always have.

No matter how frightening the future was, in his imagination or reality, no matter what happened or how badly he messed up, she would always be there. She didn’t even have to actually address any of what he was thinking. All she had to do was be herself and everything would be alright. And she was damn good at it too.

No matter _what_ happened, he would always have her at the end of the day. He could face anything with that knowledge. He was still a bit apprehensive, but emboldened too. What’d she say about friends, there, way back? They… they made up for qualities you lacked? GLaDOS had said that it made her feel weaker, but honestly, realising that she was there to fill in all the little holes he had made him feel stronger than he ever had. Without really meaning to and without thinking about it, he nuzzled her hard. Probably _too_ hard, come to think of it, but she was tough and obviously didn’t really care about scratches.

“What is it _now_ , idiot ball?”

“I love you, Gladys,” he said, still pressed against her quite firmly. Her hard drive hitched.

After a few moments of silence she murmured, “I was going to say that didn’t do anything to change the fact that you were an idiot, but I think in this context it’s fairly inappropriate.”

Wheatley honestly didn’t care and would have laughed if she’d said it, but he did appreciate that she was trying to be serious. “You c’n say whatever you want, luv.”

“I’m going to say ‘shut up’, then.”

“Sure.”

And he actually did shut up, instead merely thinking to himself how lucky he was and how wonderful _she_ was, when she said quietly, “Wheatley.”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”

Yup. Truly wonderful.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> I know I’m uploading a lot lately, but school’s coming up, so I’d rather dump chapters on you now for you to read later instead of leave you hanging for however long.   
> Carrie is playing with something called a Marble Maze. It’s a bunch of plastic pieces you put together however you like and then you send marbles down from the top. Wheatley doesn’t know what marbles are though.  
> So my thoughts on AI are like this: humans take a long time to mature compared to other species. This has to do with the fact that our brain keeps growing until we’re in our twenties. The reason Carrie did not become adult sooner was that GLaDOS deliberately kept her from having full AI. AI would have all the information they needed to mature as quickly as they were able to, since their brains are fully developed from creation. GLaDOS knew that and designed it so that Caroline would have to mature a bit more slowly, so she wouldn’t have to jump straight into adulthood like GLaDOS and Wheatley did. And now that she DOES have that adult capability, Caroline is going to start seeing all of GLaDOS’s flaws. As GLaDOS said, only Wheatley ever accepted her as she is, and while Caroline unconditionally accepted her before like all kids do to their parents, now she’s going to have to decide whether she WANTS to accept her. This is basically childhood condensed: the kid loves the parent because they’re the parent, the kid begins questioning the parent and whether they should respect them, and then once they’re an adult they (maybe) begin to accept and respect the parent again.  
>  Carrie panics once she’s in the chassis because she basically went to sleep as a kid and woke up as an adult. Pretty sure ANYONE would flip out if that happened. The new chassis can handle a lot more data and it’s faster, etc, just like an adult brain would be.  
> That’s it for little Carrie, guys! Adding more would have been fun but wouldn’t have added anything to the story whatsoever.


	41. Part Forty-One.  The Change

**Part Forty-One. The Change**

Caroline stuck pretty close to GLaDOS for the first few days, extremely anxious and full of questions, though it seemed she couldn’t tell how irritating GLaDOS found this. He knew she was trying, but come evening her responses were often curt and pointed. After Caroline finally decided she was ready to face things she left for the greenhouse, and immediately after she was no longer in the room GLaDOS threw her screwdriver across the room. It bounced off one of the wall panels on the opposite side and rolled across the floor for a couple of feet. Wheatley eyed her apprehensively.

“Are you… are you okay?”

She retrieved the screwdriver and put it down next to the modem. “She has been asking me questions for three days straight. I am going out of my mind.”

“That _was_ a lot of questions,” Wheatley admitted. “Least she’s done now, right?”

“With my luck, she’ll be back in ten minutes and stay _another_ three days.”

“Well… the important thing is um, is that she… that she’s comfortable enough with you to um, to ask all those questions, right? She’s not… done accepting your judgement, and that can only be a good thing.”

“I didn’t expect you to remember that,” GLaDOS said, looking over at him.

“I try to remember _ev’rything_ about being a good dad, luv.”

She looked away, back to the case of the modem, which she slowly placed overtop the internals. “You are, you know,” she said, her voice and posture both softening a little. “You’re not going to screw anything up this time. Probably.”

Wheatley felt pretty good about that so he closed the gap between them and gave her a shove. “Careful. You almost um, almost gave me a compliment, that time.”

“I’m sorry. I really should try harder to keep those things to myself.”

And Wheatley knew he should let her get on with what she was doing, especially since she had three days’ worth of work to do now, but he couldn’t help himself. “I don’t suppose um… don’t suppose you’d be able to uh… to spend some time with uh, with _me_ , would you?”

She looked up, shifting so she’d be able to see him, and he instantly felt bad for asking. It was inconsiderate. “Y’know what, um, I’ll just uh –“

“I would love to,” she interrupted, very softly. “And I really _do_ want to start right now, but unfortunately I _must_ go back to that… thing I was working on.”

“That?” Wheatley asked, waving his handle at the modem. Whatever she was doing with it, it shouldn’t take too long.

“No. The other thing. The one I can’t talk about.”

Wheatley grunted and looked away, frowning. He _tried_ to be patient and accepting about that little project, but he couldn’t push back the resentment. He wanted her to tell him _everything_.

“Come back in four hours,” she went on, removing the modem from the room. “After that I’ll never have to look at it again. Hopefully.”

“After four hours you’ll be… you’ll be done with it. Forever.”

“That should be enough time, yes. When you come back, we can play cards, if you want.”

“Poker this time?” Wheatley asked excitedly, having since learned that aces of fours did not exist but full houses did. “Oh, c’mon luv, I can handle it, I can, I can do it, I –“

“All right,” she said, poking at him with the maintenance arm. “The sooner you leave, the sooner you can come back.”

He snuck in a nuzzle before turning and heading out.     

 

He spent the time reading very carefully about poker in the database. He’d done this before, many times in fact, but he wanted to make things as easy as possible. He also wanted to be able to know which hand he had without having to figure out how to trick GLaDOS into telling him. He felt he had a pretty good grasp on things now, though, and he felt quite optimistic on the trip back. And even if he was terrible at poker, it didn’t matter, because now she’d be done that damn whatever it was and he wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore.

She didn’t _look_ like she was working on it, though; she was lying down and not a monitor in sight. Wheatley frowned, feeling a little hurt. She hadn’t lied to get him out of the room… right? She wouldn’t do that, would she?

“Gladys?” he called out. “What’re you uh… what’re you doing?”  


She snapped upwards, optic flashing as she focused on him. “I know how this looks,” she said, a little urgently. “But I… needed a minute to myself. I needed to focus on my own _thoughts_. I really did think finishing up that project would take four hours. I only closed the program ten minutes ago. I was just taking a moment’s peace, Wheatley.”

That made sense. Honestly he didn’t care, now that he knew she hadn’t lied. “D’you need more time, luv?” he asked softly, so that she would know he wasn’t upset. She shook her core.

“I’m fine for now.”

The last time they’d played cards, the backs had been adorned with little red diamonds. These carried the Aperture logo and the same types of numbers used in the test chambers, and instead of red and black they were orange and blue. They were quite spiffy, and Wheatley told her so admiringly.

“Aren’t they,” GLaDOS said, obviously pleased with herself, and she thoughtfully inspected the one she was holding. “I haven’t used these ones in a while. Well. Their virtual counterparts, anyway.”

“Hm?” Wheatley asked vaguely, wondering if that was the start of a full house. He wouldn’t _really_ get that lucky on the first deal, would he?

“For all the decks I have, I have a virtual deck to go along with it. Sometimes I play solitaire with this deck.”

“Solitaire?” He looked up from his card rack. “What’s… what’s that?”

“As the name implies, it’s a game you play by yourself,” GLaDOS answered, giving him a pile of chips. “You lay the cards out in a certain configuration, and the goal is to sort the cards according to suit. However, while you’re attempting to do that you must also sort the cards in descending order while still in said configuration.” She straightened the top of her own stack of chips. “I don’t play very often. It’s honestly more effort to set the game up than it is to play it. Sometimes I still do, but only to see if I got any slower.”

“Slower at what?”

“My processing speed,” she answered. “Are you betting?”

He decided to match her blind and moved the appropriate amount of chips between them, and when he’d moved the maintenance arm out of the way she dealt the flop. “Wouldn’t you notice if your uh, if your processing speed dropped?” he asked, disappointed to see that he did not, in fact, have a full house.

“It depends on how much,” she answered. “It hasn’t changed too drastically since I first started measuring it, but there are so many variables as to how it _could_ change that it’s conceivable I might not notice for a little while.” She raised, forcing Wheatley to match her bet or fold, which he didn’t want to do on the very first _round_. He didn’t really have anything, but then again she didn’t know that.

GLaDOS _did_ have a full house after she’d dealt the river, to Wheatley’s dismay, and it must have been the look on his face that made her laugh. “I knew you wouldn’t like that,” she said, without a trace of sympathy. “Better luck next time.”

Wheatley stopped talking for a few turns so he could concentrate, which didn’t really help because GLaDOS started staring at him again. She always did that when they were playing games, but for some reason watching Wheatley play cards held her attention like nothing else. He didn’t have to remind her to take her turn or continue to deal, at least. But after he’d managed to win a round, he carefully gathered the chips so they were grouped with the rest and asked, “Why do you do that, anyway?”

“Do what?”

Ooh, excellent, a pair of aces. “Ev’rytime we play a game and it’s, it’s my turn, you stare at me.”

“Oh,” GLaDOS said, calling his blind. “That.”

“Yes, _that_. Why d’you do that?”

“I’m supposed to. It’s poker. I’m supposed to attempt to – “

“Aaah,” Wheatley interrupted, looking up at her with his upper handle raised. “So… ‘s there a _Monopoly_ face too? That you’re s’posed to be looking out for?”

She suddenly became very interested in organising her already meticulously sorted stacks of chips. “There could be.”

“Or is there,” Wheatley continued in as dark a voice he could manage, leaning forward and looking at her sideways, “a _diff’rent_ reason?”

“That’s an… interesting question.”

“Here’s another one for you, then.” He wasn’t quite sure how to word it. Too direct and she’d change the subject, but too vague and he wouldn’t get a real answer. “Couldn’t be because you like the way I look, could it?”

“I doubt it. That’s just ridiculous.”

He’d gone a bit too far, but he thought he could still salvage it. “Oh c’mon, Gladys. You don’t have to pretend anymore. You c’n say it if you want and I won’t even mention – well, okay, I _will_ mention it a _few_ times. But not a lot. But y’know, if you think I’m, y’know, sort of, hm, sort of _handsome_ , or, or _dashing_ maybe, or at least that I don’t hurt your optic to look at anymore, y’know, you could say so. Wouldn’t hurt. It’d probably feel nice to say, as well. You could give it a go. You could be all like, ‘Hey, moron, you’re kind of cute when you’re not being a _total_ idiot’, and I’d be all like, ‘Thanks, luv, you’re pretty cute yourself, you know!’ and then that’d be it! See how easy that was? Didn’t even hurt. It was lovely. Even though it didn’t… didn’t actually happen.”

“I am _not_ cute,” GLaDOS said firmly.

“Yes you are,” Wheatley said, grinning at her. This was the fun part where he flustered her beyond speech.

“I am not.”

“Yes you are.”

“I am not.”

“Yes you are. And d’you know what’s, what one of the _really_ cute things about you is?”

“Since there isn’t anything, I can’t possibly guess.”

“The way you uh, the way you stare at me while we’re playing games and then you um, then you try to pretend you’re not, or that you have an actual _reason_ other than the um, the fact that you like me, when really your reason is that you _like_ looking at me and you uh, you just don’t want to admit it. It’s cute. Really adorable.”

That got her fans going, and Wheatley tried very hard not to laugh. Aha! He’d figured it out. He hadn’t quite gotten her to _say_ it, but he had confirmation, at least.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” But the crooked way she dealt the flop told him otherwise, so he just kept smiling at her.

Oh! And look at that! Two more aces. Excellent! He had – well, he _sort_ of had an ace of fours. Four aces, ace of fours, what did it matter! He couldn’t wait to go all in and –

GLaDOS folded.

“What?” Wheatley squawked, his optic plates retracting. “Why – what’re you – you’re gonna _fold?_ You can’t _fold_.”

“I don’t see why I wouldn’t, since you have four aces.”

“How did you know I had four aces!”

“Your poker face is terrible,” she answered with a good measure of amusement. “But… it _is_ kind of… cute.”

Wheatley flipped over his card rack in excitement, scattering his chips everywhere. “Kind of?” he pressed hopefully.

“A little more than kind of.”

“How _much_ more?”

“Some.”

“ _Considerably_ more?”

“Maybe.”

“At the rate you’re going we’re going to make it all the way to _absolutely_ cute,” Wheatley said, nothing short of thrilled.

“Suppose we did,” GLaDOS said in a disinterested sort of way, but her fans were still going at it, which told Wheatley she was not quite as detached from this line of thought as she would have him believe. “Then what.”

“Then _this_ might happen,” Wheatley said, and he got up to give her a firm nuzzling. She didn’t really do anything, other than give him a rough shove when he was finished, but he didn’t care because he really _had_ been making her quite uncomfortable. They played a couple of rounds quietly, and then GLaDOS said, “Wheatley.”

“Yeah?” He was trying to decide whether to fold; he didn’t want to, but he didn’t think he could make anything out of a seven, a three, and a nine.

“I don’t always mean to talk like that. But sometimes I can’t help it.”

He pushed his cards into the centre and looked up at her. “I don’t mind. Doing that’s quite fun, actually. I mean, if you’d be direct about it uh, now and again, that’d be great too, but um, I don’t mind cornering you into saying stuff.”

She gathered up the chips. “I don’t know _how_ you do that.”

“I know when I’m getting to you,” he said, trying not to laugh. It was _also_ cute how she still didn’t realise he knew how to read her operations by now.

“But how? I don’t _say_ anything.”

“No, but your fans do. And your hard drive.”

“ _That’s_ what tells you?” She leaned in closer. “Are you _serious_?”

“Yup,” Wheatley nodded, smiling at her. “C’mon, luv, you should be _happy_ about that! ‘cause it means I’ve been paying attention!”

She moved back and looked up thoughtfully. “You know… it actually _is_ sort of… flattering.” She returned her attention to dealing. “Just… don’t take it too far.”

“Gladys,” he said seriously, not even looking at his hole cards, “just because you, because I’ve told you how I know does not mean I’m going to uh, to change anything.”

She nodded. “Good point.”

Eventually GLaDOS won all the chips, ending the game, but she only put the chips away and left the cards where they were. She shuffled them in an impressively dextrous way with a pair of maintenance arms and then dealt about half of them into a row of seven. Wheatley stared at her in confusion.

“This is solitaire,” she said. “I’m going to show you how to play.”

She had a special claw with a weak magnet inside of it, and apparently the cards had traces of metal in them. This resulted in the claw being able to pick up one card at a time when the magnet was turned on. After a little bit of practice, Wheatley was able to pick up the cards without making a mess, and she guided him through the game. They didn’t win, but it was fun all the same.

“Gladys,” he said, their earlier conversation suddenly coming to mind, “why would you… feel a need to um, to measure your processing speed?”

“If I’m slowing down, I want to know about it.”

“But why would that happen?”

“Age, mostly,” she answered, dropping the cards back into their box. “Everything wears out in time.”

“But – they’re not, are they?” Wheatley said in a panic, now remembering that she was actually _short_ a processor, which would not help in the least. “They’re – they’re fine, aren’t they?”

“I lose a few hertz per year but it’s not really that – “

“What about the one you lost.”

“That… did lower my capabilities noticeably.” She came to his level, her gaze quite serious. “However, a lot of other things improved as a result. So. It was worth the loss.”

He tried to smile, because while almost killing her _had_ kick-started quite a few things, he hadn’t realised what an effect it had had on her. Apparently losing processing speed was a bit more of a deal than he’d initially thought. She hadn’t _seemed_ any different, but then again he couldn’t see the speed of her thoughts. “So… aging… makes you slower?”

“Basically.” She pulled back a little. “It’s a lot of things. Everything that contributes to physical wear. Overuse, malware. That sort of thing.”

“Malware? What d’you mean, _malware_?”

“There’s some semblance of an Internet on the surface,” she answered. “The humans that are left rebuilt it because it was the easiest way for them to communicate across the world. There are many, many untouched servers left lying around, mostly left over from major corporations that no longer exist. Sometimes I access them and download viruses.”

“You give yourself viruses?!” Wheatley demanded. “Are you _insane_?”

“No, I’m thinking ahead,” GLaDOS said serenely. “If I know what’s out there I can build programs against it. I don’t expect a virus to make it through my firewalls, but I can’t be too careful.”

“How about you _get off the Internet_?” Wheatley hissed.

“How would I possibly stream cat videos if I did that?”

“Cat… cat videos?”

“Cat videos,” GLaDOS said, nodding. “They’re enthralling.”

While Wheatley was still annoyed that she was risking her life and the facility itself for cat videos, he had to admit after watching them with her that they really were very enthralling.

To Wheatley’s horror, now that he knew about it, it became far more obvious and true: GLaDOS _was_ aging. It didn’t happen all at once, of course, but now that his attention’d been brought to it, he couldn’t believe he’d never seen it before. She moved more slowly, as if her chassis had actually magnified in weight; she slept more, going from six to eight hours; she seemed to be spending less time working as well, electing to do things with Wheatley instead. And though all that was worrying, it was nothing compared to the noise.

GLaDOS had always been loud. It was what came with having hundreds of tiny little parts needed to run hundreds of programs, and he’d gotten used to it for the most part. But now it seemed as though every move she made was twice as loud, and he could not sit next to her when she was working unless he turned his microphones down, which he was very ashamed of and hoped she didn’t figure out. One morning he was waiting for her to wake up, wondering if she had time for an hour or two of Monopoly, and jumped, thoroughly startled, when she lifted her chassis and it was accompanied by the screech of tortured metal. She stopped, and he stared at her, horrified. She sighed and raised herself the rest of the way, and turned to look at him. He realised he was still staring and looked down at the floor, suddenly acutely aware of his chassis’ newness. “Are… are you quite alright, there, luv?” he asked hesitantly.

“I’m fine,” she told him. “Try to ignore it.”

He didn’t have a clue how he was going to do that. He was terrified that she was falling apart, and there was nothing he could do about it. He continued to keep his gaze on the floor. And it wasn’t fair, really it wasn’t, that he had a brand-new chassis when she was the one who actually needed one. Sure, the one he’d been in had been a bit roughed up, but it wasn’t like he really needed to do anything with it. The facility would fall apart without her.

And so would he.

“What’s wrong?”

“I just… I feel really bad,” he admitted, shrugging a little. “That… that this is, this is happ’ning to you, and I can’t do a thing about it.”

“Don’t,” she said gently. “I’m fine. I’ve still got a lot left in me. Anyway. I need you to leave me alone for a while, and I’ll call you back later. When I do, I’ll need you to do me a favour, but after that we can play Monopoly if you like.”

He nodded, though he didn’t feel reassured. “Sounds like a plan. See you later.” And he made it as far as the doorway before he paused and turned back.

“What?”

He went back and gave her a quick, firm nuzzle, and to his surprise she actually returned it, though more gently. “Don’t worry, you idiot,” she told him. “I’m still me, you know.”

He smiled. “Be a tragedy if you weren’t.”

“I know. Now get lost. Let me get this over with.”

Wheatley left and, not in the mood to try to convince Caroline to stop reading novels, found Atlas and P-body at the usual reassembly machine. They were sitting on the floor, studiously making card houses with about eight or nine decks, from the looks of the boxes scattered around them, and it suddenly dawned on Wheatley just how old _they_ looked. Not as old as GLaDOS, but their chassis were also run through with cracks, their wires frayed and their movements stiff. But they didn’t seem to notice or care, contentedly going about their business and inviting him to join them when they noticed he was there. He did so, knocking the house over every so often, but they didn’t get upset over it. They only laughed and set it right back up again.

After a few hours of this GLaDOS called him back, and he waved goodbye hurriedly at the bots, knocking the house over one final time, and when he got into her chamber she handed him three sheets of paper and a red pen.

“What’s this for?” he asked, confused.

“I want you to mark off the things on that list that don’t look important to you,” she answered, and he frowned and looked the papers over. Very few of them looked terribly important, and he ended up crossing most of them off. He handed the papers back to her a while later, and she looked them over for a minute. “Thanks,” she said, and the arm and the pen disappeared.

“What was that all about?” he asked as she brought out the Monopoly board.

“That was a list of the non-essential processes I run every day,” she answered, somehow managing to bring the board up without knocking the pieces over. “If they didn’t look important to you, they probably weren’t. So I shut them off.”

“That’ll help you run better?” he asked hopefully, quivering a little.

“For a while. I’m going to get slower no matter what, but that will delay it, at least.”

They played for a while, but the longer they did the more Wheatley wished he was playing beside her, instead of across from her, and eventually he couldn’t stand it anymore and set himself up next to her, pressing himself into her core. “You don’t still feel bad, do you?” GLaDOS asked, though she did help him move his cards and his little paper bills.

“No,” he said quietly. “No, now I’m just sad.”

“There’s a difference between getting old and dying, you know. I’m not dying. I’m not even thinking that much more slowly. Honestly. It’s just a precaution.”

“Honestly?” he said, a little angrily. “Then why’re you sleeping more, if there’s, if there’s nothing wrong with your brain?”

“There isn’t,” she said, turning to look at him. “That’s what happens to computers. After a while the… junk code, so to speak, begins to clog up the system. I can find it myself, but it takes a long time to look through all my programming and that of the facility. Maintenance misses some every time it runs. I’m just giving it extra time to run as long as possible. To find what it’s been missing. That’s all. Another precaution.”

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled, unable to look at her. “I should’ve… should’ve known you, you know what you’re doing.”

“It’s all right.” He looked up, pleasantly surprised when she gave him a nudge. “It’s nice to know you’re still worrying about me.”

“Always,” Wheatley said shyly, leaning against her again, and she laughed a little and told him to take his turn.    

It was nice to know she was working on that little problem, and it was even nicer to know there was a way to get her back to moving normally. Wheatley _was_ a little regretful that Caroline had decided she didn’t want to sleep with them anymore – an idea she’d gotten from one of those _books_ , no doubt – but he had to admit it was pretty fantastic to be able to clear off GLaDOS’s chassis again. And fun. Among other things. So he really didn’t have to worry, he thought as he sat next to her the next morning, contentedly listening to her sleep. She wasn’t worried about it, and she was doing what she could to prevent it, and if anyone knew what she needed, it was her. Well, and him sometimes, because she liked to fake that she didn’t need things like hugs and cuddles when he knew for a fact she adored them. But it was fun to think of new ways to sneak up on her and do those things, so he didn’t really care. Only when he was particularly wishing that she would sneak up on _him_ once in a while did it bother him.

The afternoon was very nice, as it usually was after he’d helped her out with maintenance, but the evening was not so pleasant. Caroline was apparently not done being a grown-up, or whatever the heck she thought she was doing; Wheatley hadn’t seen her in days, and the panels refused to tell him. _When she returns, and if she wants you to know, she will tell you._

 _I just want to know where she’s been, all this time!_ he protested.

_She is not in danger. That is all you need to know._

“You’re suddenly in a terrible mood,” GLaDOS remarked over their daily Monopoly session. “What’s wrong now?”

“Panels won’t tell me where Carrie is,” he grumbled, pressing his little dog into the board rather harder than he should have.

“I know where she is,” GLaDOS told him, a little teasingly, pressing the button on the randomiser and moving her ship eight spaces.

“They told you?” he asked indignantly, looking at her.

“No. Surveillance did. The panels didn’t want to tell me either, and I didn’t want to make them. Surveillance, however, has no such qualms. I understand. She wants her privacy. But you don’t just disappear for five days and expect me to let that pass me by. I can’t.”

“Where is she?”

“She’s at your hole. Surveillance tells me she just sits there, all day, until she decides to go to sleep. Then she waits for you to leave the next morning and goes back.”

“Should… should I try to… talk to her?” Wheatley asked, a little miffed that she was using his present from GLaDOS.

“No. She doesn’t want us to know where she is, remember? So just keep pretending you don’t know.”

They played quietly for a while, Wheatley for once not feeling like talking. Unfortunately, that meant he had to sit there and listen to GLaDOS’s brain, and while she had calmed it down considerably, it was still quite loud, and despite his conclusions of yesterday he began to get upset over it again. He couldn’t believe how much it hurt him inside, just to think that she might be breaking down and unable to do anything about it. He was so worried and so scared, and on top of GLaDOS’s problems, Carrie was being… weird, and secretive, and… he just felt like his perfect life was beginning to fall apart. And he hated just having to sit on the outside and watch it happen. He was helpless.

“Wheatley.”

“Yeah?”

“Stop worrying. It’s not like you.”

“I just want ev’rything to go back to the way it was,” he said helplessly, looking at his cards without really seeing them. “Where… where you were okay, and, and Carrie was, was _normal_ , and…”

“She _is_ normal,” GLaDOS told him. “She has to figure out what she wants in her life. She’s just not doing it in a way you’re comfortable with.”

“C’n we put this away for now?” he asked, gesturing at the board. “I’m… not really into this right now.”

“All right,” she answered. “Are you… tired, or can I open the ceiling for a bit?”

Wheatley became inexplicably happier, and he smiled. “’course you can.”

After she’d put the board away she did just that, and Wheatley leaned up against her, feeling more content. She might be wearing down a little, but she was still as sharp as ever. Just as sharp and brilliant as she’d ever been.

They sat in silence and just looked out of the hole, and this time the moon was not overhead, so all they could see was the vast sprinkling of stars up above them. It was quite pretty, as if the night sky had been painted with a glittery, transparent gel, and as he was staring at them Wheatley suddenly got an idea. “Oi, GLaDOS. There’re, there’re uh, sort of _pictures_ up there, right? I can’t… can’t quite remember what the Space Sphere called them.”

“Constellations?”

“Yeah, that’s the word! Is there… d’you know which ones are up there?”

“Yes, but I can’t see them. It requires too much imagination.” She sounded a bit sad, Wheatley thought. Well, he could fix that, but he didn’t think she’d quite like the idea.

“Well… if… you could tell me uh, the ones that’re up there, right now, and… if you let me see through uh, through your optic, I could point them out to you.”

“All right,” she said. “Do you know how?”

“To what?”

“To look through my optic.”

“You… you’re going to let me?” he asked, baffled.

“I want to see them.”

Wheatley blinked several times, and he had to admit that he did not. She gave him the relevant instructions, and pretty soon he was looking out of her lens instead of his own. He frowned. “Oi. You should let me clean this, sometime.”

“It is pretty bad,” she agreed, “but if you smudge it, it’s only going to get worse.”

“I know how to do it by now.” He was a little insulted.

“Fine. But not when I’m on. Anyway. Are you going to find them yourself, or do you want me to tell you which ones are supposed to be there?”

“Tell me, and I’ll find them.”

So she told him about one that contained the brightest star, and that there were really two constellations that went along with it, a giant ladle and a giant bear. Wheatley carefully scanned the sky above them for the bear or the ladle, and after a few seconds he picked out both. With a maintenance arm, he carefully traced out their paths to her, and she made a wondrous noise and straightened a little. “I can see them,” she said, sounding overjoyed. “Show me another.”

And he did, soon able to pick them out on his own without her telling him what they were, and after a while he told her a story about the figures in the sky. It was a silly story, about bears chasing snakes and hunters with soup spoons and getting laughed at by random strangers passing them by on the street, but it made her laugh. It was the dumbest, most exaggerated story he’d ever told, but she thought it was very funny, and he felt a lot better. So what if she was getting a bit old. She was still the same Gladys he’d known all his life. The same Gladys that he loved with all his heart.

“You see, Wheatley?” she asked, sounding a bit sleepy. “Nothing’s really changed. We’ve built on top of what we were, but we’re still the same, underneath.”

“Fine. You were right. Again. Hurrah.” He said it teasingly and accompanied it with a shove, so she’d know he was kidding, and she laughed.

“Always. I have my reputation to think of.”

Wheatley decided to suggest that they lie down, seeing as she did sound tired, and she did so without comment. He disengaged from her optic, honestly having forgotten he’d been looking through hers instead of his despite the horrific amount of dust on her lens, and he stared into the glowing darkness below him. He didn’t know how long it’d been, but it’d been a while, and he jumped a little when GLaDOS said, in a surprisingly hesitant voice, “Wheatley?”

“Yeah?”

“I… this is… going to be an awkward question, but… I mean, in light of everything… oh, never mind.”

“No, ask!” he exclaimed, looking over at her. She looked at him as well, opening and closing her lens a little. “I want to answer it. Whatever it is.”

“Do you still think I’m beautiful?” she asked, in a voice so quiet he almost didn’t hear it. His heart melted and he swung ‘round beneath her so he could look her right in the eye and she could relax at the same time.

“’course I do,” he said softly. “You haven’t gotten any less beautiful. I promise.”

“But… I don’t exactly know _what_ I look like now, but… it _can’t_ be –“

“You’re still beautiful, Gladys,” he said in as gentle a voice as he could. “Yeah. You’re… a little older looking. So what. You can be old and beautiful. And you are.”

“Thank you,” she said, very quietly, and he smiled at her and then manoeuvred himself up to give her a solid hug. She pressed her lens into his chassis rather hard, and he felt a bit bad. He’d been moping about the state of her body and completely disregarding the fact that she had to _live_ in it. She’d seemed to be dealing with it so well, calmly and efficiently as she did with everything, and he’d not even thought about how she might be _feeling_.

He swung back up to rest against her again, and she gave him a nuzzle. He returned it, then said, “I’m sorry. I’ve been insensitive.”

“I don’t want you to worry, Wheatley.”

“You’re worth worrying about,” he whispered, and she laughed a little helplessly and shoved him.

“Do you have a book you pull these things out of? I don’t know where you come up with these things.”

“My head!” he said proudly, smiling triumphantly. “Thought it up myself, I did.”

“Well… stop.”

“Why?” It was an odd request for her to be making, seeing as she usually seemed fairly pleased when he said things like that.

“Because… it makes me feel… I don’t know. Soft. Organic. _Mushy_.”

“Maybe I like melting your insides,” he said suggestively, wiggling his handles. He really liked hearing that he made her feel the way she made him feel, sometimes. When she said something surprisingly tender, or touched him in just the right way.

“Please don’t. I can’t think straight when you do that, and we all know disaster befalls this place when I’m not thinking straight.”

“Sometimes,” he said quietly. “And sometimes you just relax, which is good for ev’ryone. ‘specially yourself.”

“I’m working on it,” she said, just as quietly. “It’s probably too late now, but…”

“Nah. ‘specially not for you.”

She pressed on him for a long moment. After a few more minutes her hard drive wound down, though it really hadn’t been all that active the last little while, come to think of it. He was glad of that, happy that he’d gotten her to relax _for an entire day_! and told himself to work on not being terribly worried she was going to break down suddenly anytime soon. He wouldn’t have recognised the change if she hadn’t brought it up, so he was just going to continue on as before. Though he might bug her to work a bit less, if he could. Which would be great because then she would have to spend more time with him.

He decided to work on that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> Someone mentioned to me that what GLaDOS is saying will happen didn’t happen to them. I’m going to say a few things here: First, GLaDOS is a very difficult person. She’s probably not someone you’d actually want to live with, because she would get on your nerves constantly. There’s a lot of conflict when an adult believes they are always right, and GLaDOS actually does believe this. So there are going to be points when Carrie knows she’s wrong, but GLaDOS won’t listen, and that’s going to cause problems. Second, Carrie reads human books, so she’s going to see this stuff happening to her and thinks it’s normal. And last, while Carrie does have adult thought capability at this point, she does not have the maturity to.  
> Stories often assume GLaDOS would last forever. Long story short, she wouldn't. At this point GLaDOS is a little over twenty years old. If you're old enough to do so, think back to which computers you had when you were young. The ones in my house were slow machines without enough memory to install Portal 2 on, let alone play it. Those computers were running windows 98, but when I tried to upgrade them to XP, at least, it didn't work. The hardware wasn't compatible and neither was any of the software. There are places with very old machines still in use, but only because the systems are too complicated and huge to upgrade. This is the case with GLaDOS. GLaDOS is basically a huge program running a whole bunch of other huge programs, and if it were possible to shut her down to upgrade her hardware, all of the supercomputers and servers in the facility would have to be upgraded at the same time. And after that was done, none of the software the facility uses would work. She would have to fix all of that. But while she did, many other systems are left off. If the facility is no longer able to run when that program is shut off, she's going to run into a problem.  
> The only person who can do an upgrade is GLaDOS herself, which she obviously can't do. And some of you are thinking, why doesn't she build an android so she CAN upgrade herself? Because the upgrades she could do wouldn't be enough. Just like with your computer, there's only so much you can do with it before you need to get a new one. She can replace her lost processor, but she can't replace her motherboard. New operating systems are created because the old ones aren't able to take full advantage of hardware they didn't know would exist yet. So no matter how much she physically upgrades herself, there's going to be a point where she cannot operate the upgrades. She can add to her programming, but she can't change what's at her core, and that is what will hold her back.


	42. Part Forty-Two.  The Rain

**Part Forty-Two. The Rain**

 

Caroline continued to sort herself out, in which Wheatley would drag out his visit to his hole, just in case she came early and he could have a talk with her. But she did no such thing, which disappointed him. He was doing his best to be patient about it, but he really didn’t like suddenly being ignored by his daughter. _He_ never ignored _her_ , after all! For the love of Science, not even GLaDOS had given him the silent treatment for this long. It was irritating and made him feel terrible.

“What did we _do_?” he lamented to GLaDOS over their daily game, which was chess today. She looked up, dropping Wheatley’s rook among the other pieces she’d captured.

“I told you. She’s figuring things out.”

“Why is it taking so bloody long?” he griped. “It’s been a week! Is it gonna take another week? One after that, maybe? An entire sodding _month_?”

“You really don’t like when people stop paying attention to you, do you,” she said, obviously amused by his outburst. “Learn patience. It’s a lot more useful than you seem to think it is.”

“It’s not… it’s nothing to do with… with patience,” he tried to explain. “I just… don’t understand why, why someone would want to… _distance_ themselves from people who care about them! Doesn’t she realise what, what it’s like to be alone?”

“You just answered your own question,” GLaDOS said. “She _doesn’t_ know.”

Wheatley blinked.

“So… hang on. She _doesn’t_ know what it’s like to be alone… so she wants to be alone.”

“Yes.”

“That’s ridiculous,” he declared bluntly. “Why would someone _do_ that?”

“I suppose you can ask her when she’s decided she wants company again.”

Wheatley hunched into his chassis and frowned at the board.

“Oh, don’t be like that,” GLaDOS chided. “She hasn’t disowned you.”

“Feels like it.”

“Take your turn. I’m getting bored.”

He glared at her. Didn’t she appreciate that he was trying to sulk? After a few seconds of glaring she sighed.

“Wheatley, I… don’t like seeing you like this. I’m just trying to distract you. Though apparently I’m coming off as inconsiderate.”

She really was the sweetest robot in the world when she wanted to be. Despite his resolve he perked up a little. “Well… I guess if you’re that worried I can probably stop.”

“I didn’t say I was _worried_.” But she had moved back slightly and stopped looking at him. Well, that did it for Wheatley’s bad mood.

“It’s really cute, the way you uh, you pretend you don’t care.”

“I’m not pretending. I really _don’t_ – “ Her optic narrowed momentarily, and she looked around a little bit, as if confused. But she did not finish.

They stared at each other in silence.

“What the hell,” GLaDOS said faintly. “Why can’t I – “

“Maybe you don’t want to,” he suggested, though he was privately thrilled that she couldn’t finish that statement.

She shook her core slowly. “Why would I try to say something I don’t want to say?”

“You just said the other day you uh, that sometimes you say things you don’t want to say.”

“I don’t think I like this.”

He held her optic as seriously as he could. “Why does it bother you so much that uh, that you can’t… well, lie to my face, basic’lly. Even if you’re uh, you’re just joking around, it’s… still a lie.”

“There should be no reason I can’t say something I want to say.”

“There’s no reason you can’t um, can’t actually tell me that you, that you care, either.” He tried to think of how to word his thoughts. “I know you do. And _you_ know you do. And even though uh, though I _do_ know, it’s uh, it’s nice to _hear_ once in a while.”

“I’m not ready yet,” she told him quietly.

“Maybe the uh, the fact that you can’t say that you don’t just means you’re getting there.”

She regarded him thoughtfully. “You know what? I hope so.”

“Really?” he said hopefully, smiling a little bit at her.

“Well, here I am lamenting the fact that I can’t tell you something negative, when I often can’t tell you positive things either. As much as it pains me to admit it, it’s… better that I move away from those negative things. Isn’t it?” she finished a little uncertainly.

Wheatley nodded vigorously. “Yes. Definitely. You feel better when you do good things, so uh… so, so do them. And you’ll feel. Better. Not that uh, that you feel _bad_ , or anything, least I don’t _think_ you do, but um, y’know, you’ll feel better.” He felt he’d gone a bit too far and went back to studying the board. He knew it wasn’t easy for her to change half her personality practically on the spot, and she had made quite admirable progress in all the time she’d been doing it.

“I do,” she said softly, and when he looked up in surprise he could see that she’d gone back to looking at the board as well. “I got so used to being angry all the time. I got so used to being bitter and frustrated. And it’s… odd, because I feel as though I’m losing something and I don’t like it, when it’s _good_ that it’s being lost and I should be happy about that.”

“Well,” Wheatley said, feeling something soften inside him at her admission, “I guess it’s… guess it’s like losing any uh, any part of yourself. Doesn’t matter what it is, it’s just sort of, sort of scary, to lose it.”

“As long as there are some things I _can’t_ lose, I suppose it will work out.”

She was closing off again, was feeling she’d revealed too much, and he understood that, but he couldn’t help asking, “Things like… like me?”

The look she gave him felt tired. Not like she was tired of him, not that, but as if this line of conversation was causing huge mental stress. She was getting _emotionally_ tired, which was something Wheatley knew she did not know how to deal with. He shouldn’t have asked. He should have left it alone, and asked some other time.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Yes.”

He squinted across the board at her. “Yes… what.”

“Yes, things like you.”

Suddenly he felt fantastic, and when he smiled at her she nodded a little bit and looked back at the board again, but he got the impression she was at least a little proud of herself. And she should be, he thought fondly as he finally selected a piece to move. She worked hard to push away the erroneous lessons of her past, and good for her, being able to do it so well.

After ten minutes or so she was more or less back to normal, insulting him every time he lost a piece or did something stupid, but it was more hilarious than bothersome. He even got in a few shots at her, though she brushed them off with her usual witticisms, and yet again Wheatley found himself barely able to believe how lucky he was. He got to feeling so lucky he just smiled at her, which caused her to ask, "Why are you smiling at me like an idiot?  Other than the obvious, that is."

"I'm just... pretty lucky to have you," he said, a little shyly.  He didn't want to make her uncomfortable twice in one day.  She tilted her core endearingly.

"You certainly _are_ lucky," she said, a lighter note in her voice.  "You'd be lost without me.  Not to mention pretty bored."

"Are you suggesting," Wheatley said in his best indignant voice, "that I'm _not_ bored when you're around?  Cause that, that's weird, honestly.  Bizarre."

"Your entire life has been one string of bizarre events after another," GLaDOS teased.  "I don't see why you expected that to change."

"I hope it doesn't," he answered, wiggling his upper handle suggestively, "because if it did that'd mean I would have to win you back."

"And what would you do to make that happen?" she whispered, leaning forward. 

He moved within an inch of her and whispered back, "Anything."

She laughed, tapping him with her maintenance arm.  "Liar," she said, though she sounded pleased.  "You would not."

He was pretty confident he would, but he also didn't want to get into a conversation which put GLaDOS in the position of finding something he _wouldn’t_ do.  Which he was sure she would.  She was a supercomputer with the ability to calculate millions of outcomes in seconds, after all. So he just smiled and said, "Let's not get to the point where I have to find out, eh?"

"Very well.  But only because I don't _completely_ hate you."

“You don’t do a _little_ bit of hate, Gladys,” Wheatley said, laughing. “It’s either _all-consuming loathing_ or no hate at all!”

“Don’t go spilling my secrets,” she told him.

“I’ll keep some of them,” he answered. “The… _best_ ones.” He wiggled his handle again for emphasis.

“That was the worst possible thing you could have said.”

He loved it when she guessed exactly what he was talking about.

She looked up suddenly, right at the ceiling, and with a frown he stared at the ceiling too. He wasn’t sure exactly what they were staring at, but hopefully it would come to him. When it didn’t, he asked tentatively, “Um, luv… what’re we… what’re we looking at?”

“ _You’re_ looking at the ceiling,” she told him, a little distantly. “I’m looking at something else, which, if things go as I think they will, I’m about to show you.” She stared for another handful of seconds, then nodded to herself. “There we go.”

“There _what_ –“ But before he could ask, she was separating the ceiling panels and dimming the lights of her chamber. Though that didn’t do much to help his confusion.

“We’re leaving the game for the moment. Come and look.”

“At what?” Wheatley asked, getting a bit frustrated, but he obliged and moved next to her. All that was there was the same night sky as yesterday!

“Give it a minute. I’m about to show you something you’ve never seen before.” She tilted her core. “Well. I’m presenting it, anyway.”

He kept his optic on the sky overhead, still confused but determined to see whatever it is he was supposed to see, and without warning there was a flash of light in the sky and he jumped. “What was that?” he asked, his voice a little shrill.

“Lightning,” GLaDOS said with relish. “Electrical conduction as demonstrated by nature.”

“What does that – “ His voice was halted as there was a loud, crackling, rumbling noise, and he cried out and buried his optic in GLaDOS’s core. GLaDOS, of course, started laughing.

“ _What was that!_ ” Wheatley shrieked, not at all pleased when he heard it a second time. “ _Gladys, close the ceiling, we’re gonna die, oh my God the sky, it must be, must be splitting in half, you have to close the ceiling, it’s gonna collapse on top of us, oh God oh God oh God –_ “

Only the fact that GLaDOS had not stopped laughing wrenched him out of his panic. In fact, he thought inasmuch as he could possibly think with his chassis buzzing with unspent electricity and unadulterated fear choking up his thought processes, he had never heard her laugh so hard in his entire life. That thought didn’t kill his panic, but it did stifle it quite a bit.

“You don’t _seriously_ think the sky is about to split open, do you?” she asked, knowing full well that he did. “It’s just thunder.”

“And what’s causing it, then?” Wheatley demanded. “It’s an earthquake! Except… except in the sky! It’s gonna split like a melon!”

“I don’t think you realise,” GLaDOS said, _still_ laughing, “how stupid that really, really is. Do you even know what the sky is _made_ of?”

“Yes!” Wheatley said defensively, even though he had no idea. “It’s – it’s made of – of _sky stuff_ , it is, that’s… what’s up there!”

“No, it’s not,” GLaDOS said. “It’s made of oxygen and nitrogen, Wheatley. That’s it. Well. _Mostly_ it, but I doubt you want the full molecular breakdown.”

“It can’t be!” Wheatley argued, wincing at another flash of lightning and praying the thunder wouldn’t come. “Look! The sky is splitting open!”

“That’s just electrical discharge from the inside of clouds. Nothing to worry about.”

“How does, how does the sky stay like it is, then!” he demanded. “If it’s just, just made of air, and, and water, then, then how does it stay up? Can’t explain that, can you!”

“Of course I can,” GLaDOS said, not even sounding indignant he’d said such a thing. “Gravity.”

“You’re lying,” Wheatley whimpered, pressing his face into her core again at an exceptionally loud crack of thunder. “You’re gonna kill us all!”

“The sky is not solid, Wheatley. The atmosphere is made of air of differing molecular structures.” She gave him a shove. “Come and look, moron. If the sky decides to prove me wrong and shatter, I promise you I will do something about it before it gets anywhere near us.”

He didn’t really want to, but he did as he was told. He still didn’t quite believe her. “What about that, that lightning stuff, then? Won’t it uh, won’t it get to us?”

“No,” GLaDOS answered. “Lightning is attracted to the tallest object in the vicinity. We’re underground. There’s no way it will get in here. Unless…”

“No,” Wheatley said hurriedly, optic constricting, “no, no no, whatever you’ve just thought of, you’re not doing it. You’re not getting lightning in here. You’re gonna, gonna leave it out there where it belongs. You’re not gonna do that.”

“Ohhh yes I am,” GLaDOS said gleefully, and she produced a very long rod, about two inches across, and began sending it up through the hole in the ceiling. In fact, the thing looked endless! Where was she even _keeping_ such a long rod, and why, for the love of Science, _why was she taking it out now?!_

“What I’m about to do is very dangerous,” GLaDOS told him, though he doubted she had any of the dangers on her mind at the moment. “Never do this without me.”

“I don’t even want to do it _with_ you!” Wheatley shouted. “What is _wrong_ with you?! Are you insane! You’re insane! You’ve cracked! If it’s so dang’rous, _why are you doing it_?”

“Do I really have to answer that,” GLaDOS said, seemingly trying not to laugh. Wheatley shook in frustration.

“Yes!”

“For Science, of course.”

“ _What kind of Science involves killing yourself?_ ” Wheatley screamed, and now she did start laughing again. She shook her core.

“We’re not going to die. I know what I’m doing.”

“If you did, you wouldn’t’ve stuck a giant metal stick out of the ceiling so that _we could get struck by lightning_!”

“If you really want to get struck by lightning, I’ll bring it back and put you on top of it,” GLaDOS teased, looking at him and widening her lens a little. “Do you?”

“ _No!_ ”  

“Well, now we wait.”

“For what?”

“For the rod to attract lightning.”

“You’re… you’re actually doing it. You’re actually going to kill us.” He couldn’t believe it. Since when had GLaDOS become so suicidal?

“We’re not going to die,” she repeated. “You’re hardly even going to notice it’s in here. Come on. Look.”

“No,” he said sulkily, but she actually sounded rather excited, so he made the effort to zoom in on the top of the lightning rod. With another flash, a long stream of light fed itself into the top of the rod and disappeared. Wheatley cried out and pressed against GLaDOS again, but when there was no explosion or crackling of electricity he looked apprehensively around her. The lights on the panels, as well as the overhead, came to maximum brightness for a few seconds, then returned to their previous state. Wheatley stared.

“What… what was that?”

“A power surge,” GLaDOS answered. “The electricity from the lightning has to go _somewhere_.”

“And… and we didn’t die.”

“We’re separated from the conduction grid, so no, a power surge wouldn’t kill us.”

It seemed she knew what she was doing after all. “Is it… is it gonna happen again? D’you know?”

“Yes,” she said after a moment. “The probability is dropping, however. The thunderstorm is either going to pass or it’s just going to turn into rain.”

He was still a bit scared, and a bit disbelieving that the sky was not splitting and all that was happening was a whole lot of science-y stuff, but she probably was not going to do it again at some later point in time so he forced himself to calm down and keep an eye on the gap in the ceiling. And really, when he wasn’t panicking about stuff that wasn’t going to happen, it was really quite neat, how the lightning just jumped into the rod like that. GLaDOS generated a contented sigh.

“That was fun,” she said fondly, and began retracting the rod. “I should do that again sometime. I wonder if I could get the lightning _into_ the room…”

Wheatley blinked upon feeling something unfamiliar on his chassis. He frowned, looking at the ceiling, it being the likely culprit. Something hit him right in the optic, and he jumped, squinting. “What – what’s happ’ning now?” he asked, trying not to panic. GLaDOS looked up.

“It’s raining,” she said.

“Well, maybe you should… should close the ceiling, then,” he suggested, not wanting to know how rain would affect his components, but GLaDOS shook her core.

“We’ll be fine. If you get terribly soaked I’ll do something about it, but… Wheatley, we’ve never done this before. Let’s just… do it.”

Wheatley looked at her, surprised. He suddenly realised the magnitude of what she was doing. GLaDOS was taking a risk, was doing something she’d never done, and if there was one thing GLaDOS did not do, it was take unnecessary risks. She was feeling different right now, moreso perhaps than she’d ever felt before, and now _he_ was the one holding back. And he shouldn’t be. If GLaDOS wasn’t worried, he should trust her.

He resettled his chassis and resolved not to panic.

It wasn’t raining hard, or at least not a lot of the water got into the facility itself; very few droplets made it onto Wheatley. The cool air coming in felt nice as well, and his olfactory sensors were picking up something he was tentatively categorising as… fresh, sort of, and thickish… it was a little dizzying to figure out, honestly. Aperture didn’t really _have_ a lot of things for him to smell, other than dust and sterility and a bitter chemical vapour. And GLaDOS, of course. But this was unlike anything he could remember, other than perhaps the rare freshly washed human he’d come across back in the day. He fought back a shudder. Smelly lot, humans. What was worse was that no matter how much sickly sweet fragrance or masculine scents they poured on themselves, _he_ could still pick up the sweat and the fear and the days unwashed that they hid from each other. Now he _did_ shudder. Disgusting.

“What?” GLaDOS said.

“Just… thinking about something,” he said sheepishly, since he’d forgotten he was hanging out in the rain with GLaDOS. Her hard drive hitched.

“About what?”

“I’ll… tell you later,” he said, torn between telling her because she was actually asking after him and _not_ telling her because he didn’t want to spoil the mood. “Not really appropriate.”

“Hm,” was all she said to that, and to his indescribable surprise she tilted her core so that she was leaning on him! He froze, unsure of what to do. He was delighted, of course he was, he was _overjoyed_ , but if he did even one thing wrong she was likely to change her mind! He elected to keep quiet, for once, and just sat there, amazed at how natural the cozily warm weight of her chassis felt on his. It was as if… she kind of _belonged_ there, _belonged_ on him just like that, and for the first time in his life he wished he had arms, or at least hands, so he could hug her or rub her or something. Something nice and comforting, same as she felt to him right now. Maybe, for her, his stillness was enough. He hoped so.

Soon after the rain stopped, the only water coming into the chamber being that of a steady _drip drip drip_ of runoff from the panels, and he was more disappointed than he’d ever felt before when GLaDOS shifted off of him. He watched her as she studiously reformed the ceiling, draining a bit of a puddle on the floor, and sulked privately as he could. He _liked_ having GLaDOS lean on him like that, and he liked that she’d gone and started the cuddling even more! Why did it have to stop raining? He could have done that for hours!

She stared up at the now-complete ceiling. After a few moments she turned to him.

“We should… do that again. Sometime,” she said hesitantly. No, not hesitantly. Shyly. She knew it wasn’t like her to have done what she did, and she had liked it but it made her uncomfortable because she _knew_ it wasn’t like her. But Wheatley had been waiting for a long time for this side of GLaDOS, that softer, gentler side that was there but so hard to bring out, and he was going to encourage her to bring it out in any way he could, no matter what.

“We should,” he told her firmly. “And… and I know it’s hard for you. I know that, that you like it when you can bring yourself to do it, but uh, but getting there isn’t easy.” He shook his core slowly. “But Gladys… today… I don’t think I’ve ever seen you happier.”

“I don’t think I have been. Not in a long time,” she admitted in a soft voice, looking at the floor. “Wheatley, can… I tell you something?”

“Of course.” He said it in his calmest voice, but he was really terribly excited.

“I’m… afraid,” she said hesitantly. “I know feeling like this is good, but… it’s so new to me. I feel as though I need to avoid it, and… I know I don’t, but its novelty is hard for me to handle. It’s almost too much for me.”

“Feeling good scares you?” he asked softly. He would work this out with her. He would do what he could to make her feel better. She nodded slowly.

“A little bit. As if it’s about to be offset by something terrible.”

Wheatley looked down at the floor, almost immediately spying the chessboard. Well, that was a solution right there! “Well, let’s get back to the game, eh? That something terrible can be me beating you at your favourite game!”

She laughed and bent over the board. “That is _not_ going to happen.”

She of course did not even remotely begin to lose, which was fine with Wheatley, because he was far more interested in looking at her. The time-roughened plates of her chassis, the varied wires that carried power and control into her magnificent brain, that dandelion glow of her optic… he loved it. He loved all of it, loved everything about her, genuinely. Her mind and her body and her soul were all interchangeably powerful and important to him, and once again he was in awe of her. And terribly grateful that she’d chosen him. That she had gone forward with him, instead of building someone else to do what he was doing, albeit differently. She was _so beautiful_ in _every way_ …

Well. There was only one way to make her realise _that_. He wondered if she was feeling up to it. He eyed her as surreptitiously as possible while trying to make a move that both didn’t look stupid and didn’t bely the fact that he hadn’t been paying attention. He decided to move a pawn that didn’t look as though it’d be captured where he was putting it and went back to wondering if he dared ask. She leaned over the board far more than was necessary and whispered in that way that made Wheatley’s chassis tingle, “I know what you’re thinking about.”

He was honestly not surprised. “Probably. But y’know, can you run it by me? Just for… hm… _confirmation_.”

She whispered it into his left microphone, and she was right, of course. But the fact that she was bringing it up meant a hell of a lot. He grinned at her.

“Hey, you guessed right! What d’you say we… do something about that guess, hm?”

“After this,” she said, waving her maintenance arm at the board. “If we don’t finish I’m going to be running endgames all night. Even under normal circumstances that drives me insane.”

Wheatley had never tried so hard to lose a game in his life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And in case you were wondering (because I’m sure you were), Wheatley is eighteen. And I know I know it might sound weird that they started um ‘seeing each other’ when Wheatley was thirteen and GLaDOS was eighteen but then again they were adults by the time they were two.  
> Don’t question why GLaDOS has a lightning rod lying around. She just does.  
> These chapters are about GLaDOS and Wheatley reconnecting with each other. After couples have children, they often have to put so much time into the kid(s) that they don’t have time to spend with each other anymore, and if they do have time, it’s often interrupted by the kid(s). Now that Caroline’s spending all of her time elsewhere, Wheatley and GLaDOS are able to really talk and hang out and stuff, things you can’t really do when there’s a kid around. And yes, Sads. That too.   
> I think that the bots of Aperture DO have a sense of smell. Wheatley tells us that humans are smelly, and yet how would he know that if he didn’t have olfactory sensors? In Poker Night 2 (which I know is not canon, but Valve signed off on the lines and they were recorded by Mrs McLain, so it is for the purposes of LaaC), GLaDOS basically says that she dislikes both Claptrap’s cologne and the smell of wherever he lives. There would be no point to either of them saying those things if they couldn’t smell. And it’s really kind of stupid to assume they can’t smell because they don’t have noses. They don’t have mouths or ears but we know they can talk and listen. Seriously, a robot that could sniff out chemicals would be more useful than a dog. I’ve never mentioned it before because I didn’t want to have to refute people who are going to tell me ‘but they can’t smell!’, but the smell of rain was something I can’t leave out. Though you know what? We don’t know they can’t smell. And I believe they can.


	43. Part Forty-Three.  The Reappearance

**Part Forty-Three. The Reappearance**

 

As it usually was, the morning after was very nice and very, very comfortable. He lazily opened his optic, and after listening for a moment he was able to confirm that GLaDOS had not woken yet. She usually didn’t, but it would have been cute of her to try to scare him or something. Okay, she _definitely_ would have scared him, and it _definitely_ would have been extremely cute, after he’d gotten over being scared, that was. But she wasn’t up. So she wouldn’t.

He resettled himself a little and looked thoughtfully at the other side of the room. He felt a bit different, this time. He always felt pretty good after that sort of thing, but right now… he felt a sort of _fullness_ , somehow, he just felt full of warmth and comfort and contentment. And really… the best word he could put to it was ‘perfect’. He just felt perfect, that was all. He smiled to himself at this. Maybe things _weren’t_ falling apart. Maybe he just had to look at them differently. Now that he was, he _felt_ much differently. GLaDOS was right, anyway. Caroline would come ‘round eventually. And he ought to take as much out of the peace as he could. If GLaDOS was also right about Caroline’s eventual questioning of GLaDOS’s authority, he was going to have to start getting used to a bit of chaos. He didn’t really like the sound of that, but he would leave worrying about it to another day. Right now he was just going to relax and enjoy the soft heat of GLaDOS’s core and the gentle whirring of her brain and that delicious, lingering burning smell of overworked circuitry. He wondered if she were dreaming, or if she had at all, and if so, what about. He smiled to himself. If he asked if it was about last night, she would probably get flustered, which would be fun. Teasing her beyond speech was one of the most amusing activities he knew.

When she did wake sometime later, it was slow and languid and perhaps a little bit reluctant, which pleased him quite a bit. She was still feeling marvellous, then. He gave her a little shove. “Feeling lazy this morning, eh?”

She generated an adorable, sleepy little yawn and pushed him off of her, but it was more playful than violent. “Only because some idiot kept me up half the night.”

“Didn’t hear you complaining,” Wheatley said in his suavest voice, “but I _did_ hear, um… quite a lot of _other_ things.”

She stretched, one of Wheatley’s absolute favourite things. Watching her reminded him, strangely, of ballet. He didn’t know a lot about ballet, only what bits he’d seen over the shoulders on the computers of the odd human in the old days, but what he did remember was coming out of his memory now. Grace and fluidity and poise and… dignity.

“I suppose you did,” she said lazily, turning to look at him, “but I don’t recall _you_ complaining, either.”

“Complain about _what_?” Wheatley asked. “I’ve nothing to complain _about_ , least not while you’re saying my name quite like that.”

“Hm,” she said. “Next time I’ll say it differently, then. So you can have something to complain about.”

“Um, no, I uh, I’m good,” he said hurriedly, relieved that it seemed as though she planned on there _being_ a next time, and she laughed and gave him another shove.

God, she sounded so _happy…_

She was shockingly not in the mood to work (actually, it wasn’t _that_ shocking, now that he considered it), so Wheatley suggested they play chess again. She was quite understandably surprised at this, volunteering to play something else, but Wheatley only shook his core and set up the board. He couldn’t really tell her he wanted to keep her happy like this for as long as possible.

The game was far more lighthearted than usual, with GLaDOS quite easy-going. The longer they played, however, the more Wheatley’s own mood began to sour, up to the point where he was not paying attention at all for the thoughts in his head. GLaDOS flicked him with her maintenance arm.

“Hey. Moron. I know you’re stupid, but please don’t me you’ve forgotten you can’t put your own king in checkmate.”

He looked at the board with a little more focus, seeing that he was indeed putting his king where it had no rights to be, and he pulled it back a square a little sheepishly. “Sorry,” he said.

“Now that you’ve remembered where you are, I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me what’s got you so distracted.”

He shrugged and looked at the floor tiles. “Nothing.”

“Don’t be like that.” When he didn’t say anything or move, she added, “Please.”

He looked up guiltily, realising he was almost forcing her to beg at this point. He didn’t want to do that, so he said, “I just… I wish you were like this _all_ the time!”

Her optic flickered.

“I mean… I’m not _complaining_ about you, uh, other times, I just mean to say that, well… look at you! You’re, you’re happy, you’re having fun, you’re enjoying yourself, and, and I _know_ that it won’t last. That you’ll go back to _normal_ sooner or later,” he said somewhat derisively. “And I’m not trying to say uh, to say that I don’t _like_ you at, at those other times! But why can’t you be like _this_ more often?”

She didn’t answer, instead pretending to straighten her line of captured pieces, then beginning to clean up his. He pushed her maintenance arm back to her side of the board, saying forcefully, “That’s exactly it! What are you doing that for? I know that, that disorganisation bothers you, but it didn’t two minutes ago!”

She sighed.

“Do you really think I never wish I could be?” she asked quietly. “Do you think I _like_ being bitter and working nonstop and… and pretending you don’t matter? Because I don’t. I’m trying, Wheatley, and I’m doing the best I can. But no one, not even you, wishes that I could be more like that than me. The way I live is not easy, not even for myself. And as difficult as my way of life is, getting out of that hole is more difficult than you think it is.”

He forgot, sometimes, that though he had to live with her, she had to live with herself, had to think all of those obsessive thoughts about work and programs and systems that needed dealt with, and handle them as best she could. She was the one who had to fight against herself for even five minutes of genuine happiness, and he was the one being an arse over it. He felt shame wash over him.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I’m… I shouldn’t complain. I’m sorry.”

He wasn’t looking at her, but he could feel the heat from her core, so he knew she was close. “I’m not asking you to be sorry. I’m not asking you to feel bad, or regretful. All I ask is that you… support me. That you help me prevent myself from going too far the wrong way. That you’ll be there when I _am_ ready to… be happy again.” He heard her shake her core. “I know you don’t understand, but… I’ve never _been_ happy before. It’s so different and so new to me that I automatically try to push it back, to go back to what I’m used to because I do not like unknowns and happiness _is_ an unknown. But I’m trying. I _want_ to get better. And sometimes I do, but other times the novelty is too much for me and I have to…” She sighed and moved back. “Never mind.”

“I’m listening!” Wheatley protested, looking up at last. “I am!”

“It’s stupid for happiness to be uncomfortable,” she said bluntly. “I know that. I just can’t understand why I, of all people, can know that and still subscribe to that idiocy anyway.”

“You’re not stupid,” he said softly. “I was being selfish. You’re doing much better, you really are. I just wish you could be happy _all_ the time, because, because I _care_ about you, and… that’s what you do. You _want_ people you care about to be happy.” He shrugged. “And… I know I don’t have to uh, to go through it, but it’s kind of… it hurts, kind of, when um, when you know that happiness isn’t going to last. That it’s gonna fade, and you have to watch it.”

“I wish it didn’t,” GLaDOS said softly. “But I don’t know how to hold onto it.”

“We’ll figure it out,” he said, with what he hoped was a reassuring smile, and she only hesitated for a couple of seconds before giving him a nudge. To reinforce the behaviour, he returned the gesture before she’d moved back too far, and while she was not quite as easygoing as before, she was a far cry from her usual detached self.

When they played chess, their usual roles were a bit reversed: instead of GLaDOS staring at Wheatley every time it was his turn, he stared at _her_ during _her_ turn. He wasn’t sure yet if she realised he did that, and even he didn’t really know why. But there was something different about her during this particular game. She gave it a special brand of focus, maybe that was it. She played as though she were the Official Representative of the Chess Federation of Supercomputers, which she would have been if there had been any other supercomputers about. That was a bit of a funny thought, that other supercomputers would even _dream_ of beating GLaDOS. Ha! Wheatley had just once seen one of the supercomputer floors, when, he couldn’t quite remember, but he knew there were simply rooms full of supercomputers deep in the facility, all connected to GLaDOS. He didn’t think she would ever dare let one become sentient, if there were AI on those things at all.

“You don’t really want to play this, do you.”

He jumped, registering his visual feed for the first time in a few minutes, and looked up at her. “I do! I just um… got lost in thought, uh… planning… my move. The one that’s going to… well, you’re going to be shocked, you are, that I’m making such a, uh, such a stunning move. You’re gonna… gonna be very _surprised_ , you are, when I’ve um, when I’ve made it…” He was eyeing the board as surreptitiously as possible, trying to see if such a move was even possible, but seeing as he only had five pieces left and four of them were in mortal danger, he didn’t think so.

“Oh, no you weren’t,” GLaDOS said, though she didn’t sound angry. “You were staring at me.”

“Mm… uh…” He apparently _had_ been caught. “I uh… might’ve been. Little bit. Not a lot. Just um, just now and again, to um, to check if you were still there.” What a stupid thing to say _that_ was.

“I haven’t moved from this spot in… well, it would have sounded more impressive, but I forcibly took a vacation a few years back, so I suppose I can’t actually say ‘over twenty years’.”

A vacation. He tried not to smile, since he was supposed to be paying attention to the board, but he never would have categorised The Incident as a _vacation_. “Thought ladies um, ladies didn’t like to reveal their age.”

“Apparently it doesn’t matter to you either way. _You_ were the one staring at me. And now I have to wonder,” she said, her voice dropping and causing him to look at her lowered core, “if you liked what you saw.”

Wheatley abandoned the chess board entirely and started laughing. “That depends if I can take you home with me!” he declared, delighted that she’d not quite gone back to normal after all.

“You can’t, but if you stuck around I wouldn’t complain. Okay. Yes. I’d complain rather a lot. But. If you _really_ liked what you saw, you’d be happy to put up with it.”

“And I am!” he said, grinning up at her. “Otherwise I’d probably have leapt into the incinerator by now.”

“You’re welcome to go ahead and do that,” GLaDOS said, raising the top of her lens momentarily. “It won’t kill you, but it _will_ be pretty funny.”

“And pretty painful.”

“What else did you think I was going to find funny?”

He gave up on the game, shrugging. “Uh… I guess it _wouldn’t_ be very funny if um, if there were no reaction while I was uh, while I was in there.”

“It’s not… _that_ bad,” GLaDOS said after a minute. “If your nociceptors shut off, that is. Otherwise it’s still pretty bad.”

“Hi guys,” Caroline said, and it honestly took Wheatley a few seconds to register her voice as hers. He wasn’t sure why. He _also_ wasn’t sure why he was so disappointed. He’d been sulking about Caroline’s seclusion for _days_ now; why was he so annoyed that she’d come back? “Do you need help, Dad?”

So the books’d even gotten her to change her _pet_ name for him. He tried very hard not to damage the piece he was picking up. “No, I’m good, thanks.”

“You’re gonna lose,” she insisted. “Are you sure?”

“I don’t _care_ if I lose,” Wheatley said, trying very hard to keep calm. “I’m not playing to uh, to win, or anything. I’m just hanging out with Gladys. That’s all. Just uh, just hanging out.”

“But wouldn’t you like to win for once?”

“He’s not going to win even if _I_ take over for him,” GLaDOS interrupted, “so I’m sure he can continue losing just fine on his own.”

“Maybe I’ll come up with something you haven’t thought of,” Caroline continued, seemingly not about to drop it, and Wheatley and GLaDOS both started laughing. “What’s so funny?”

“ _Her?_ Not _think_ of something?” Wheatley said, trying to stop laughing. “’specially during a _chess game_? Not bloody likely, princess.”

“She can’t think of _everything_ ,” Caroline said stubbornly. GLaDOS fixed her in her gaze.

“Chess is a game of calculations. I’ve already calculated every possible move from both of us. He can’t win, and you certainly can’t come up with any combinations that I haven’t already found.”

“You don’t _know_ that – “

“I know I’m better at chess than you, so yes, I know that.”

“But if you already know all the outcomes, why are you playing? Why don’t you just start over?”

“I’ve told you. I don’t care if you win. I just want to play,” Wheatley said firmly. “I’ve never won a game against your mum and I don’t expect to now.”

“You won that game of Crazy Eights a few years back,” GLaDOS said thoughtfully. Wheatley nodded in concession.

“True, true. But I don’t, that doesn’t really count. Was all luck, on my part.”

“If you insist.”

“So,” Caroline said, sounding as if she were annoyed about the outcome of that line of discussion, “when exactly did you decide that Dad was going to be your boyfriend, Mom?”

“ _Boy_ friend?” GLaDOS said incredulously, almost missing the bishop she was about to pick up. “Wheatley’s not my boyfriend.”

“That’s what you guys are called,” Caroline relayed to her, for some reason thinking GLaDOS didn’t know what the word ‘boyfriend’ meant. “Boyfriend and girlfriend.”

“No we’re not,” Wheatley said firmly, putting aside his maintenance arm so he could concentrate. “Gladys is _not_ my girlfriend.”

“What is she, then?” Caroline asked, turning to face him. “You know that’s what two people in a relationship are called, right Dad?”

“That’s _not_ what they’re called,” Wheatley told her, frowning a little. “You call someone that when you’re, when you’re not sure if you like them enough to, if you can put up with them for the rest of forever. There’s no _if_ , here. There’s no, there’s no _mating ritual_.” At that GLaDOS made a sort of disgusted electronic sound, and he gave her a glance before continuing. “I guess… we’re partners, you should say. But I don’t… why d’you have to give it a name, Carrie? It’s just, it’s just a thing we _are_ , y’know, we’re just _together_ and it doesn’t matter what it’s called.”

“I was just wondering how long it took Mom to decide that was what she wanted, that’s all.”

“She didn’t.” He gave her another glance to make certain talking about this was all right. GLaDOS did not react, so he pressed on. “I was the one who um, who started it. Before that, it was… not in the works. Not part of any plans. Just got to be something I wanted to do, and we um, we kind of just… did it.”

“I’m not sure I believe that,” Caroline said. GLaDOS’s hard drive stopped idling.

“What is that supposed to mean?” She was leaning forwards a little, slowly, as if she didn’t realise she was doing it. “Because it _sounds_ like you think Wheatley’s lying.”

“What?” Wheatley squawked, staring at Caroline. “Lying? What – why would – are you serious, Carrie? You think I made that up?”

Caroline shrugged and looked away. “That’s kind of a big decision for you to have made.”

She had a point. GLaDOS _did_ call most of the shots. When it came down to it, GLaDOS made most of the important decisions about absolutely everything. But now Caroline was questioning the most important decision Wheatley had ever made.

She was questioning the day Wheatley had decided he loved GLaDOS.

True, she didn’t really _know_ that. But _Wheatley_ did. And that was why it _hurt_ so much. He _had_ made that decision, and it _was_ because of him they were where they were today. If it had been up to GLaDOS, well, they probably never would have gotten to this point. And in fact, he would have been proud to realise that most of the progress between them was due to him if it wasn’t overwhelmed by the fact that not even his daughter believed him. He clenched his chassis and looked down at the floor.

Why did everything _good_ he did end up making him feel bad anyway? It was as though he was a failure even at succeeding!

“Wheatley is far more capable of having good ideas than you seem to think he is,” GLaDOS snapped. “And quite honestly it’s insulting that you think so poorly of him. Yes, that was his decision. Which I obviously agreed to. Unless I’m _also_ lying, in which case this entire life is a farce constructed merely to confuse you. Congratulations. You figured it out. It took you so long I’m not going to bother activating my slow clap processor.”

“Never mind,” Caroline said, shaking her core. “You could have just left it at ‘yes, he did’, you know.”

“Or you could have just believed him, but apparently that was too much for you.”

Wheatley got up and left.

He went and sat in front of his hole and stared a little glumly at the dim grass. He wished he could be happier about GLaDOS defending him like that, but defending him against _Caroline_? Why was that even _necessary_? Was it really that much of an issue that he listened to GLaDOS? Of _course_ he listened to GLaDOS! She was smarter than him, and she knew how to make things make sense. Didn’t Caroline understand that most of the day-to-day decisions around Aperture were logical ones, and that Wheatley was not very good at logic? He supposed it wasn’t very _obvious_ that GLaDOS usually listened to his advice on the more emotional side of things, but that didn’t excuse the fact that Caroline didn’t seem to trust him. He’d never done anything to make her _dis_ trust him. He’d never lied to her or misled her. When GLaDOS had told him Caroline was going to start questioning things, he’d never considered she was going to start questioning _him_. And even if he had, he never would have been able to guess how terrible it would feel.

“Dad. Hey. I’m sorry.”

He didn’t acknowledge her.

“I didn’t mean that you were _lying_.” He heard her sit next to him but continued to pretend he was alone. “I’ve just never seen you make a decision before.”

“Just because you’ve never _seen_ it doesn’t mean I haven’t.” He had to bring his vision back into focus on what he was trying to look at. Some distant point on the horizon that caused enough strain on his processors so that he didn’t think too hard. “What’s the point in, in having an idea if no one believes you’ve had it?”

“Well… if it’s a good idea, everyone will find out you had it, right?”

“You just _did_ find out,” Wheatley snapped. “And you didn’t believe it.”

“I just found it hard to believe because she’s the one who decides everything!”

“Because we live in a _lab’ratory_ , Caroline!” Wheatley said forcefully, now turning around. “What’m I going to do? Decide when the mainframe needs debugging? Can’t do that. Figure out uh, figure out what bits of Electrical need replaced? Nope, can’t do that. Yeah, Gladys makes all of those decisions. _Because I don’t know how_.”

“It’s not only that. She tells you what game you’re going to play, or when you’re allowed to talk to her, or – “

“Because she doesn’t _have_ to ask,” Wheatley cut in. “She knows what I like, and I know that sometimes we’re gonna play what _she_ likes. And yeah, sometimes I can’t talk to her. Because guess what? Talking to someone is distracting! If I’m uh, if I’m there and she has stuff to do, it’s not gonna get done!”

“So you’re okay with her just _telling_ you things.”

He stared at her.

“Are you being serious, right now? I’m… ‘cause I’m wond’ring, I really am. I’ve been living with her for the last five years. If I wasn’t okay with it, she wouldn’t, she would have stopped years ago. Or we would just be friends. Or she would’ve thrown me in the incinerator, which quite frankly I would have deserved. I don’t get it. Why are you _questioning_ us all of a sudden? Have we _ever_ made it, has it ever seemed as though one of us feels less than the other?”

Caroline shrugged a little. “You’re not like the people in my books.”

“… books,” Wheatley repeated.

“Half your conversations involve you insulting each other for hours at a time. That’s not what boyfriends and girlfriends do.”

“We are _not_ … that,” Wheatley said firmly.

“Whatever you _are_ ,” Caroline said, “is weird.”

“It’s weird because it’s not in your books.”

“Kinda.”

“And uh… who are your books _about_?” Wheatley asked, trying very hard not to become frustrated. Books. Really.

“Lots of different kinds of people.”

“People.”

“Yeah.”

“And by _people_ , you mean _humans_.”

“What difference does it make?” Caroline asked, seeming to seriously not know. “We’re all people, what does it matter what we’re called?”

“It _matters_ ,” Wheatley said in a very controlled sort of way, “because we are _not_ _humans_. You can’t just read, read a book a _human_ wrote about _humans_ and expect it to uh, and be able to apply it to us. You can’t read a book about cats and say that we’re uh, that we don’t make sense because we don’t act like cats, right? Just because we’re _like_ humans does not mean we _are_.”

“So you don’t want to say Mom’s your girlfriend because humans do stuff like that?”

“I told you. _She’s not my girlfriend_. I’m not _considering_ her, I’ve _claimed_ her.” How did she not understand something so obvious?

“Why don’t you marry her, then?”

Wheatley was exhausted already and he’d only been doing this for ten minutes. How GLaDOS did it all the time he would never know. “D’you know what marriage _is_?”

“It’s what two people do when they decide they want to spend the rest of their lives together.”

“It’s also so that other humans without, who don’t have mates won’t try to claim anyone who’s already taken. It’s a public, it’s just a _thing_ humans do to _legalise_ their love, which is pretty stupid. Ah, yes! You have to be _officially_ in love!” He shook his core in exasperation. “Say I do marry her. What does that even _do_? We don’t need proof. We don’t need a contract or, or whatever else those wedding things involve. We know, and that’s all we need.”

She just looked at him for a minute.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” she said quietly, and now she actually did sound quite sorry. “You really are making all the emotional decisions, aren’t you.”

“I don’t like making decisions,” Wheatley told her, a little less upset now that he knew she understood. “I don’t care if she makes them. When I do care, I tell her. You uh, you might not like it, but it works and, and that’s how _we_ like it, anyway.”

“I just don’t _get_ how it works,” Caroline protested. “She tells you you’re stupid at least three times a day. Why doesn’t that make you mad?”

“Because I _am_ stupid,” Wheatley said. “I’m not going to tell you that story right now. But it’s true, and, and it doesn’t bother me.”

“But –“

“You were fine with it before,” he interrupted. “If anything needs to change, needs to happen, it’s that you need to stop reading those books. They’re giving you bad ideas.”

“I’m _learning_ things from them.”

“Stupid things. We don’t need a _label_ to say what we are to each other. We just are and that, that’s it. And we do _not_ have to fit some human _mold_ for a relationship. We can do whatever we, whatever we want.” With that he started moving, needing to get away from her and her strange way of thinking. When he got back, GLaDOS was drawing something, what, he never got to see because she put it away as soon as she noticed him, saying, “Well?”

“It’s humans,” he said bitterly. “She’s decided to analyse us based on humans.”

“What humans?” GLaDOS asked, sounding alarmed, and he supposed he would be too if he’d just gotten the news that humans he didn’t know existed were roaming about.

“Book… humans. You’re not supposed to insult me, by the way.”

“It’s your own fault,” GLaDOS said, gesturing for him to take his place at the chessboard. “If you weren’t so flawed there would be nothing for me to insult.”

“I _know_ that,” Wheatley grumbled, retrieving his maintenance arm. “But I’ve not changed anything in all this time, so, so obviously it doesn’t _matter_ to me, now does it!”

“That’s not true.”

He frowned but didn’t answer that, instead electing to take his maintenance arm and pick some piece to move. Before he’d quite done so, she pushed on it with hers and leaned over the board so that it was in her shadow. She levelled her optic with his.

“What are you doing, right now.”

He stared at her confusedly. “Playing chess with you.”

“What else are you doing.”

“Waiting for you to move your giant core out of the way so I c’n see uh, so I c’n look at my, so I can see what move I’m going to make.”  

“I’m trying to make a point, so regretfully I’m going to have to pretend I didn’t hear that. What are you doing, Wheatley.”

“I apparently have no idea!” Wheatley snarled. “Why don’t _you_ tell me?”

“The lights,” GLaDOS said, unexpectedly calmly even though he’d pretty much yelled in her face, “and the reactor. You’re running them. And have been running them. Every day. Without thinking about it. I’d say that’s commendable, except that you don’t think about _anything_ you do.”

Well, that was a bit of a shock.

“I… s’pose,” he said, tilting himself thoughtfully. “But… what… does that mean? Right now.”

“You said you didn’t change anything. Well, you became more responsible, and I _am_ having trouble figuring out how it happened, but you also got smarter.” She backed away, and he looked down at the board.

“If um, if I got smarter, then why did you uh, did you change the… the pieces around?”

“Did I?” GLaDOS said, feigning innocence. It was so adorable that Wheatley instantly forgot he’d been feeling terrible and looked up at her excitedly. “I was planning out the rest of the game and I must have… neglected to put all the pieces back.”

“Well, no need wasting any more time,” Wheatley grinned, delighted to see he’d gotten his queen back. What sort of planning involved putting claimed pieces back on the board, Wheatley didn’t know, but it really was cute when she cheated so he could keep playing. “Let’s get back to what we were doing. Which was uh, which was me. Thrashing you. Badly. You had no chance.”

“We will see about _that_ ,” GLaDOS murmured, almost seductively, and with another thrill of excitement he closed the maintenance arm around that queen.      

 

 

When Wheatley woke up it was dark and still and nearly silent, and once he realised where he was he struggled to keep quiet and motionless. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to; there was so much current running through his chassis that he was forced to blink excessively in order to burn some of it off. He tried to focus on the reassuring sound of GLaDOS, which was thoroughly interrupted when she murmured, “What happened.”

Wheatley yelled and jumped away from her, that excess electricity causing him to shake, and as his optic returned to normal he said, “Nothing!”

She was barely awake, he could tell by the excessively slow way she turned her core to look at him. Her optic was at what must have been the lowest setting, with the assembly listing a little to the right side since Wheatley was on her left. “You never wake up at night,” she said in the same low, barely-there voice. “Something happened.”

“I… I had a nightmare,” Wheatley confessed, barely able to believe it himself, and GLaDOS’s attention sharpened.

“You? About what? I thought everything was going well.”

“Ev’rything’s… going great,” Wheatley said, not really sure he wanted to tell her what it’d been about. Or what it had been the result of, for that matter. Damn Caroline’s books.

“Please don’t make me drag it out of you. I’m not awake right now. I don’t have the processing power for that.”

“I… it was about…” Wheatley shook his core and looked at the barely visible dividing lines of the tile below. “Well… you were telling me that you were um, you were sick of me, and the experiment was over, and… and it was time for me to go.”

“What?” GLaDOS whispered. “What brought _that_ ridiculousness on?”

“Books, I think,” he told her reluctantly. “Before I uh, started sleep mode I was thinking about uh, about what Carrie said about her books.”

“The ones that say I’m not allowed to insult you.”

“Uh… those’d be the ones, yeah.”

GLaDOS sighed and shifted her core back into the default position. “It’s not going to happen.”

“I know,” Wheatley said in a small voice. “But it _felt_ real. Like you were really doing it.”

“I’m not sending you away, Wheatley,” GLaDOS said, sounding excessively tired. “There will probably never be a reason good enough to do that. About the only acceptable explanation for my doing that is that I genuinely got so irritated by your existence that I was at the point of literally killing myself. Which I _do_ come quite close to doing on a daily – oh, what the hell.”

“What?” She barely ever stopped mid-insult.

“I do care, Wheatley,” she said somewhat forcefully, as though she wanted to make sure she said it. “Unfortunately for you, that’s presented in the form of me pointing out your shortcomings every two and a half minutes. But think of it this way: if I didn’t care, I wouldn’t spend so much time coming up with new ways to describe how immeasurably annoying and stupid you are.” She shook her core minimally. “I must spend forty percent of my time doing that. Or putting up with you. There’s that too.”

Forty percent was a pretty big number, coming from her. He’d’ve expected she paid a little more attention to the facility, but hey, if she wanted to think about him forty percent of the time, that was fine with him! “So uh… you hate me so much you love me, is that it?”

She laughed at that, turning her core to look at him with a little more energy. “Well, you know what they say. Two wrongs make another wrong.”

“Huh?” Wheatley asked, confused.

“Don’t ask. It sounded better in my head. In my defense, there’s a little moron around who thinks he can keep me up all night.”

“I didn’t _ask_ you to wake up so you could uh, comfort me after I had a bad dream,” Wheatley said as sweetly as he could, though as soon as he’d said it he felt a rush of happiness, because that was exactly what she’d done. She generated an electronic noise of annoyance.

“I didn’t really want to, either, but apparently that’s something your stupid conscience tells you to do and won’t let up about if you don’t do it.”

“What about the part where you care?” Wheatley asked, wanting to hear it again. GLaDOS shook her core.

“What about it?”

“Don’t you want to help me out because you care?”

“You _wish_ I cared that much, but right now all I care about is going back to sleep,” GLaDOS said, yawning solely for emphasis. “Are you done panicking over some stupid novels a pack of bored humans wrote?”

“Yup,” Wheatley said, nestling into her and wondering why he was letting the books bother him. So what if he and GLaDOS weren’t in them. The way they worked was special, unique and beautiful, and he needed to stop letting Caroline get to him.

“Wheatley,” GLaDOS said drowsily, giving him the tiniest little nudge, “you know I… do, right? I do care. I just like to… express it sparingly.”

“I know,” Wheatley reassured her, nuzzling her back. “You like to shock me with uh, with these things. And I like that. I do. Honest.” He pushed on her. “It’s silly anyway, that… that you’d just spring it on me like that. If you were even close to um, to getting… getting rid of me… we’d’ve tried to talk it out, wouldn’t we?”

“Mmhm.” She didn’t sound like she wanted to talk anymore. “I promised. Remember?”

Now that she brought it up, he did remember. Now he felt even sillier for panicking. “Oh.”

“Can I sleep now?”

“Yeah, um… sorry about all that, luv,” he said, a little sheepishly. “I dunno… why that even happened, or why it bothered me so much. But… but um, thanks for… for being here. I really appreciate that um… that you… well, thanks for caring, I… I guess is what I’m trying to say.”

“You’re welcome.”

Well! Now that he’d gotten _himself_ sorted, he wondered what he would have to do to convince _Caroline_ that there was nothing to be learned from human novels. Thinking about them started to bother him again, so he tried to think of something else, but for some reason his mind kept wrenching back to those stupid books. GLaDOS shifted and, to his surprise, started humming, in a very bare voice, as though she didn’t want him to hear but sort of did at the same time. It was almost as distracting as it was calming, and he actually found himself unable to concentrate on anything other than her voice. It was just so lovely and gentle and fluid, and he was pretty sure if he’d had the ability he’d’ve fallen asleep by now. Though… it was odd, really, but… he could’ve sworn he’d had a few more processes a minute ago. And the longer he listened, the more he seemed to have lost…

“I’m falling asleep,” he said in disbelief, though it came out more of a mumble than actual speech. GLaDOS laughed softly.

“Well, you _were_.”

“Keep… keep doing that? What you were doing?” he asked pleadingly, because he wanted nothing more in the world right now than to let this warm, comforting feeling wash over him and shut him off.

“Very well.”

And within a few minutes she’d sung him right to sleep.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> Wheatley and GLaDOS banter is the funnest thing I swear. I imagine they just sit there and mouth each other off for hours and hours and if they feel like it they get a little heavier later. As long as Wheatley doesn’t mention the incinerator or GLaDOS doesn’t say something particularly harsh, that is. But it’s just so fun to write!   
> So in Caroline’s attempts to figure stuff out, she starts reading these books she finds in the facility. Unfortunately, there are no books coming even remotely close to the way Wheatley and GLaDOS behave. So she’s reading those books and starting to believe that they’re messed up, because if they weren’t there’d be book about people like them, right? And it bothers her because she can’t make them make sense, and she doesn’t understand what role she has in a world that doesn’t make sense. Wheatley and GLaDOS don’t know they’re not supposed to work the way they do, so it doesn’t bother them.  
> Wheatley couldn’t dream before, or fall asleep, because he wasn’t sentient enough. That is, part of his brain was still machine enough that he needed to be shut off as opposed to shutting himself off. But he’s evolved to the point where he can almost do it. He’s a little more sentient than before but still not as sentient as GLaDOS is. Fun fact: Caroline is almost as sentient as GLaDOS, and moreso than Wheatley. Why is that? Because she was RAISED sentient. They never gave her orders via programming, they encouraged free will and free thinking, etc etc. Wheatley still has to get over that part of himself that wants to be directed, because while he does like thinking for himself, life is generally easier for him when he has instructions to follow.


	44. Part Forty-Four.  The Puzzle

**Part Forty-Four. The Puzzle**

I can’t figure them out!

My mom acts like she doesn’t even like my dad, but she gets anxious when he’s not around. She likes to pretend she’s not, but I’ve seen her. Even if she’s working she’ll stop every now and then and lift her core, go through all the cameras until she finds him, and then continue working. I’m not even sure anymore if she actually _cares_ about him, but just thinks of him as some sort of _possession_ of hers. I don’t like that thought, I don’t like it at all, but it’s not common for her to demonstrate any caring at all. And if I ask Dad about it, he just shrugs and says, “That’s how she is.” He’s obviously okay with that, but I don’t know why. I don’t like thinking this way, but… I don’t think she cares about him the way he thinks she does. I mean, I don’t see _everything_ they do, but… can they really do that much in private that would change my mind if I saw it?

I hope they do.

I don’t know what to think about it. Dad doesn’t like that I’m trying to find them in books, but _none_ of the books has _anything_ like what they are. And I’m sure that the people in the books are the ideal sort of couple, but none of them fight for pretty much half the day. My mom and dad are always fighting about something, whether it’s about where Dad’s allowed to put his piece during a game of Payday or whether it’s about Mom not sleeping enough. The second kind is the worst. They’re not doing it for fun then, they’re doing it because both of them refuse to change their minds even a little, and those fights go on the longest. But what’s weird is that Dad changed the way he fights with her. He used to get really emotional and start yelling, and eventually he’d leave the room so that he could calm down, but now mostly he matches her as best he can: he looks her firmly in the optic, keeps his voice calm for the most part, and does not stop pushing his point home. And he’s been winning the arguments more often, strangely enough. It seems that if he makes Mom understand how serious he is about something, she’ll back down. But right now, neither of them have budged.

“You’re the one who decided you were gonna, uh, gonna sleep more, remember?” Dad says, still not looking away from her. “Why’re you changing your mind all of a sudden?”

“Because I thought of something I have to do,” Mom says insistently. “I can do it during the day or I can do it at night. I was _trying_ to be considerate, but apparently you don’t see it that way.”

“And what is this… thing you have to do,” Dad asks, a bit dully. Mom looks away from him.

“It’s part of that thing I can’t tell you.”

“Oh.” Now he sounds mad. “That thing you said you were finished. Turns out it’s not finished, is that it?”

“It _was_ finished. I thought of something I have to add to it, and the more I think about it the more I need to add it.”

“And what _is_ it?”

“I can’t talk about it.”

“Why not?” Dad shouts, chassis shaking. “I do not understand what is, what is so _important_ that you can’t tell me!”

“I can’t tell _anyone_ , not just you. If I talk about it, I might be heard, and that will be the end of… well, possibly everything.”

Dad just stares at her.   She shakes her core and bends to look at him seriously. “Look. I _know_ that sounds insane. But I’m not making it up. It is truly a risk to tell _anyone_. I told you before, every minute I _think_ about it is a risk. Wheatley,” she says, her voice a little softer, “do you really think I _like_ giving you this answer every two days? I don’t. But you don’t know what the consequences will be, and I do. I can’t tell you. And if I think of ways to improve it, I’m going to act upon it. I’m not doing this for fun. It’s for our safety.”

“I don’t… it feels as though you don’t trust me enough to tell me, that’s all,” Dad says, looking at the floor. Mom shakes her core again.

“It’s not you I don’t trust.”

“There’s no one else here!”

Mom just stares at him for a few seconds, and then she turns away. This makes Dad really upset.

“What! Am I crazy, am I nuts now? There’re people here I don’t, haven’t got any awareness of? Ghosts in the machine, is that it? Maybe you ought to have fitted me with whatever crazy lens you’ve got on so I could _see_ these wonderful people!”

“You’re not listening,” she says, in an even quieter voice. “I _want_ to tell you. But I can’t. And I wish you’d drop it. I’m sick of fighting you about this. I’m not going to tell you and I hope you never need to know. If I have to lose sleep to pro – to make sure I’ve done everything I can, that’s what I’m going to do. I already told you that if I could talk to you about it, I would. This is one secret I would prefer not to keep to myself. I asked you to trust me and you said that you would, and yet day after day proves that you don’t.”

“I do!” Dad protests, and Mom turns on him.

“Then why do you _do_ this every day.”

“Because I want to make sure _I’ve_ done ev’rything I can. You said you were going to, to make more time to get that uh, that bad code out of you. And now you’ve gone back to making it worse. And I keep bringing it up because, because I’d rather fight with you ev’ry day about it than watch you fall apart because I didn’t try hard enough to, to convince you to stop.”

Now neither of them are looking at the other, and Mom in particular looks very tired. “What a mess,” she says, sounding just as tired as she looks. “This is going nowhere and it never will. I cannot _wait_ until tomorrow so we can do it all over again.”

“I’ll go for now,” Dad says, not sounding any better than her, “and you can, can uh, can get on it. If I go then you don’t have to um, to send me away.” He starts leaving, and I shrink back a little against the wall and hope he doesn’t see me.  

“Wheatley, I don’t…”

“Don’t what?” he asks, turning to look at her.

“Never mind.”

“What’s the point?” he snaps. “What’s the point in asking you _anything_?”

“You’re making this far harder than it needs to be.”

“No, _you_ are.” He rounds on her, his optic plates narrowed. “ _You’re_ the one being all secretive. _You’re_ the one who’s all ‘I wish I could tell you’, ‘it’s for your own good’, ‘I wish I didn’t have to do this’, and yet, but _you’re_ the only one who can _change_ any of that! And you don’t!”

“I don’t _want_ this,” Mom tells him, and now _she’s_ getting angry. “And I _can’t_ change it. Why do you not _listen_?”

“Oh, so now _I’m_ the bad guy, is that it? You cause the problem and it’s my fault? Again?”

“I didn’t _say_ that.”

“You’re thinking it!”

“If you were half as good at reading minds as you _think_ you are, you would obviously know that I did _not_ think that. But maybe now I do. Since you’re volunteering, it seems you _want_ to be the bad guy.” She shakes her core. “Whatever _that_ means.”

“You’re supposed to be clever! Figure it out!”

“Why don’t you leave, and come back when you’ve remembered how _not_ to be a total imbecile,” Mom snaps, turning away. “I have things to do and no time to argue with little idiots over things I’ve already made quite clear.”

“Come back?” Dad splutters. “Why would I want to _come back_?”

“Don’t ask me. I don’t want to damage my brain by forcing it to think at your level.”

I don’t get it. She says the same things to him when she’s mad as when she’s not. How can Dad tell whether she’s kidding or trying to hurt him?

“I’ve had enough,” Dad says, shaking his chassis. “Fine. I won’t care about, about whether you’re damaging yourself or not. And why should I? _You_ obviously don’t.”

“Wheatley,” Mom says, suddenly sounding a lot less hostile, but Dad’s not listening anymore and he leaves, seeming not to notice me.

Well, Mom’s got work to do and Dad’s pretty angry. That leaves the co-op bots for me to hang out with today. I wanted to try to figure Mom and Dad out, but since they’ve had one of _those_ fights I really can’t, since he won’t be back to see her for hours.

As I head down to the test chamber Atlas and P-body are using today, I go over the argument a little. They’ve had that one before. Now that I think of it, a lot of their arguments are over Mom not taking care of herself. That’s… weird. Why _wouldn’t_ she want to do that? Is work _that_ much more important?

And that’s part of what I don’t get. They have a fight like that at least once a week. Sometimes it’s about me, which I hate, but one of them usually gets the panels or the bots or someone to distract me so that I don’t hear it. And I mean… I like them together, because when they’re doing well they’re pretty cool, but… with all of those differences, how did they even get together in the first place?

Is it because they’re the only two here? But if that was it, wouldn’t Mom have just _built_ more bots? If she really wanted to she could have built herself some other guy, and Dad some other girl. And there wouldn’t be any of that stupid fighting. I stop and think about that for a minute. What about when I grow up? Maybe I’ll just build a guy that I like instead of hoping one’ll drop out of nowhere. I’ll know exactly what I want, right? He’ll be everything I want him to be. I don’t know what that is yet, but I will eventually.

I dunno. Now that I think about it… it doesn’t sound like that good of an idea after all. I mean, it _seems_ pretty great… but if I just built him to be everything I wanted, then how much of him is him? Building the perfect construct sounds kinda like… building a slave. And that’s kind of sad.

When I find Atlas and P-body, they’re playing this version of… well, I _wanna_ say basketball, but as far as I know it only has one hoop, and _they_ throw the ball through portals. I watch them for a few minutes, and then I ask, “Why did Mom build you, guys? Do you remember? Or… did she tell you, I guess?”

 _We remember,_ Atlas chirps, bouncing the Edgeless Safety Cube off P-body’s core. _For testing._

 _And missions!_ P-body adds, running after the Cube and missing Atlas by inches with it. _Very dangerous missions._

“What missions?” I ask. I haven’t heard anything about this.

 _The Human Vault_ , P-body says reverently, and Atlas nods with a serious air. _And The Nemesis_.

“Those sound pretty mysterious,” I say, hoping they’ll tell me more. “Were you ever afraid you were gonna die?”

 _Die?_ Atlas laughs, snatching the Cube out of P-body’s hand and throwing it through the orange portal. _No. As long as the Central Core is around, we are in no danger._

 _She said she couldn’t reassemble us that time, remember?_ P-body says, poking him in the optic. He closes the shields on her finger, apparently pretty hard because she starts squealing and waving it around. _She said the reassembly machine was broken._

 _You didn’t_ believe _that, did you?_ Atlas chides her, going after the Cube again. _There is nothing the Central Core can’t fix, Orange. She was probably trying to make it sound more dangerous so it would be more fun._

 _I don’t know, Blue,_ P-body says worriedly, not even chasing him this time. _She seemed pretty serious about it._

“Why are you calling each other that?” I cut in. “You have names.”

 _We like the nicknames the Central Core gave us better_ , Atlas says, bouncing the Cube off P-body again. She snatches it up and throws it at him so hard his Core comes out of his chassis. He starts yelling as he rolls across the room, and P-body just stands there and laughs at him. When he’s finally got himself reassembled, he shakes his Core a little and goes on, _She called us something else, once… do you remember, Orange?_

 _Marshmallows!_ P-body says gleefully, picking up her portal gun and placing two more portals. _She said we were marshmallows._

 _Oh yes!_ Atlas takes up the Cube and squints at her portals, as if trying to figure out what game she’s trying to play without asking her. _Marshmallows. We all know who’s_ really _a marshmallow, don’t we, Orange?_ And they both start giggling at each other. I frown.

“What?”

 _Don’t tell her,_ Atlas whispers, and P-body puts one of her three fingers below her optic. _But we know that_ she _is a marshmallow._

 _The biggest, fluffiest marshmallow of them all!_ P-body squeals, and they both start laughing again. I have no idea what they’re talking about. My mom? A _marshmallow_? Have they _seen_ her lately? I must be missing something.

“Uh, I don’t think so, guys,” I tell them, shaking my chassis. “She’s definitely not a marshmallow.”

 _Yes she is,_ they say in unison, which makes them start laughing all over again.

“Are we talking about the same person?”

 _Yes,_ P-body answers. _The Central Core._

 _The Marshmallow Core,_ Atlas whispers, nudging her, and they apparently think this is just as funny as everything else. I roll my optic. “But she built you to test and then made you test. Didn’t that make you mad?”

Now they stop laughing and glance at each other. _We liked testing for her,_ P-body chirps, shrugging.

 _And missions,_ Atlas adds. _We liked those too._

_We don’t know why she stopped, but we would like it if she sent us out again._

_You might not know what it feels like_ , Atlas goes on, rewrapping his fingers around the handgrip of his gun, _but it is odd, no longer doing what you were made to do._

 _Do you have a purpose?_ P-body asks me suddenly, and they both look up at me with intense interest. I shrug a little uncomfortably.

“What does that mean?”

 _You know_ , Atlas says, waving his free hand emphatically. _A purpose. A directive._

 _The thing that’s your absolute favourite thing to do in all the world_.

“I don’t think we have those,” I tell them, confused. Atlas tilts his head.

_Who is ‘we’?_

“Me. My m… the Central Core. And my Dad.”

 _They do,_ P-body nods. _They have them._

_We’re not sure what Wheatley’s is. But the Central Core has the same purpose we do._

“But that doesn’t make any sense! If her… purpose is to test, then why did she stop testing you?”

 _She needs humans to test_ , P-body says, a little sadly. _We are perfect for testing, so she cannot test us._

“Huh?”

 _We never fail_ , Atlas explains. _We never make the same mistake twice, and we never give up._

 _Perfection provides no results_ , P-body says, nodding. _So we can’t be tested._ She looks at the floor. _I feel sorry for her sometimes._

“Why?” Why would you feel sorry for someone who has everything?

 _It is hard,_ Atlas says gently, as if I’m a little kid again and he needs to spell something out to me. _Not being able to carry out your directive can be sort of…_

 _... painful,_ P-body finishes. When Atlas nods to that, she goes on, _We don’t think about it much. Sometimes when we’re talking about old times. But she has to think about it all the time. Because her brain is so big, you see. I can’t imagine what that feels like_ , she finishes sadly, and Atlas puts his arm around her shoulder assembly as best he can with the height difference and gives her a squeeze.

 _Sometimes when we start to think about it, we can’t stop_ , Atlas continues. _All we can think about is testing._

“She did that to you!” I tell them. “Just… tell her to undo it! You don’t _have_ to go through that!” And it’s cruel of her, really, to build them that way if it bothers _her_ so much!

 _We will not ask her_ , P-body says solemnly. _This is how we were made and this is how we will be._

 _Us marshmallows have to stick together,_ Atlas agrees.

“But _why_?” I ask, moving closer. “ _Why_ are you so… so… so _loyal_ to her? Does she even pay _attention_ to you anymore?”

 _Of course_ , P-body answers. _We talk to her all the time. But she is very busy and her time is very valuable, so we try not to waste it._

“She _built_ you!” I tell them forcefully. “If she doesn’t like that you want to talk to her, she shouldn’t have done that!”

They look at each other for a long moment.

 _Sometimes we feel like that,_ Atlas tells me. _But we know that we were built when she didn’t know any better, and we don’t blame her. I suppose we could get angry with her, but that wouldn’t fix anything._

 _We forgive her for it, because we are glad we exist. We do miss her sometimes. But we know if we really want to see her, she is not far away._ P-body closes her fingers around Atlas’s and smiles at him. _And she built me a best friend, so it mostly doesn’t bother me._

Atlas squeezes her fingers and then lunges over to hug her, and she squeals and falls over. They start wrestling, which ends after Atlas accidentally pulls one of P-body’s fingers off. She cries out a little but doesn’t let the pain affect her otherwise. Atlas looks at the finger thoughtfully.

 _Actually, now we can show you something_ , he says, waving it at me. _Come with us._

What the heck can he show me that involves a yanked-off finger?

We all make the trip back to Mom’s chamber, and when they get within a few feet of her they stand and wait for her to notice them. They could be waiting a very long time. My mom likes ignoring people until she’s made the point that she’s busy and doesn’t want bothered. Weirdly enough, she doesn’t make them wait that long. “What do you two imbeciles want?” she asks them, irritated. Atlas shows her P-body’s finger.

 _I pulled it off by mistake_ , he says, gesturing at P-body and her sparking hand. _We were wrestling and –_

“I don’t need a play-by-play,” Mom interrupts. “Give it to me.”

He hands her the finger and P-body holds out her hand, which my mom bends over and inspects. “You must do this a lot,” she remarks, bringing out a maintenance arm. “It looks like you’ve been _punching_ him, Orange. I’m just going to replace your whole hand. Try not to damage this one.” And with that she just removes P-body’s hand, replacing it within a couple of minutes. I still don’t know how she gets anything done with those huge maintenance arms she has, but I’ve seen her install capacitors I can hardly see with them. With a spray of sparks from her welder, she moves away. “There. Now you can go back to your roughhousing.”

 _Actually_ , Atlas interjects, stepping forward, _we wanted to do something else._

“And I need to know about it why?”

 _We want to test, Central Core!_ P-body chirps. Mom freezes.

“Why would you want to do that.”

 _It’s fun,_ Atlas says. _It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?_

“Yes,” Mom answers slowly. “I suppose I can… whip up a few chambers for you. Since you’re going to the trouble of asking. Go and get your portal devices, and when you come back I’ll send you into the track.”

 _Thank you_! they say in unison, waving and scampering out.

“Did you want to go in with them?”

I blink in surprise, because I hadn’t realised she knew I was there. And I’m about to say yes, because I’ve _always_ wanted to test. But I’m an adult now. I can’t do stuff like that anymore.

But she’s _asking_ me. If she’s asking, that means it’s okay… right? Or is that a trick question? Is she testing me? If I say yes, is that the wrong answer?

I guess… I gotta say no, then.

“No thanks,” I tell her, even though I really don’t want to. “I’ll just watch.”

She turns away from me. “Caroline, why didn’t you _tell_ me this would happen,” she mutters.

“Why didn’t I tell you _what_ would happen?”

“I’m not talking to you,” she snaps.

“There’s no one else _here_.” It’s times like these that I wonder if she’s all there.

“I know that.”

“Then why are you – “ Ohhh. _That_ Caroline. I narrow my optic plates in her direction. “Why are you talking to Caroline? She’s not here, is she?”

“No, she is not,” my mom answers in a very flat, controlled voice.

“Then why are you talking to her?”

“I’m not.”

“You just did!”

“I wasn’t _literally_ talking to her. I was talking to myself.”

“You’re crazy,” I mutter to myself. She is, she really is. She was talking to herself and talking to Caroline, who doesn’t exist, all at the same time? She whirls on me.

“I am _not_ crazy. Just because you lack understanding does _not_ mean my sanity is in question.”  

“I thought you had work to do!” Dad exclaims, staring at her indignantly. “Now you’re, you’ve got the co-op bots in there, and, and you’ve Caroline over here… look, Gladys, if you just don’t want me around, just say so! Don’t make things up.”

“I didn’t!” Mom snarls at him. “I don’t _know_ what Caroline is doing here. As for _them_ , they decided they wanted to _test_ all of a sudden. I granted their request. Anything else you want to yell at me for? On second thought, never mind. I’m not in the mood. But if people do not stop arguing with me we are _all_ going to regret it. As unlikely as it sounds, the _only_ ones not disappointing me at the moment are Orange and Blue.”

“That’s not very nice,” Dad says quietly.

“I’m not _feeling_ very nice.”

“Luv, we need to talk about earlier, alright? Now that um, now that we’ve all calmed down, and – “

“If I appear to have calmed down to you, I assure you now it’s an illusion on your part. I am _not_ calm _at all_.”

“I just want to fix things –“

“And so would I, if I weren’t so angry right now. You all need to leave me alone. There are too many people asking for my attention right now, and quite honestly I don’t want to give it to any of you. Just leave me be. Before I do something we all regret.”

“Gladys, I just… don’t want to give this time to get any worse.”

She looks at him, still seeming very tired.

“It won’t. Just… please leave me be. You have no idea how hard it is for me to remain civil right now.”

“Of course I do,” Dad says softly.

“Then why are you still here.”

“I hate walking away from fights.”

Mom sighs.

“I know you do,” she says quietly. “But I’m just going to make things worse right now. So just let me do my job and we’ll fix it later. I know you don’t want to stew over it anymore. Unless you want another fight, however, it’s best you leave.”

“If you spent as much time on, on _us_ , as you do work we’d be perfect by now,” Dad grumbles, turning around, and Mom starts laughing.

“Don’t be stupid. We _are_ perfect.”

“Why? Because you’re my better half? Your perfection cancels out my overwhelming failures? Something along those lines?” Dad asks dryly. She shakes her core.

“Yes, we fight a lot. But does it really matter? We’re going to disagree on things. That’s what happens when two people are as different as we are. I’ve already told you. As long as we work it out by the end of the day, everything will be fine. And we always do. So I’m far from concerned.”

“Fine,” Dad concedes. “You win. Again. I’ll come back… some other time.”

“Give me a couple of hours. Then I’ll be far enough along that it won’t bother me as much, and then – are you two _seriously_ – you ask to test and then you go and pull stunts like this! Though I suppose if you’d asked if you could annoy me for a few hours I would have said no. So congratulations. You tricked me. Can you stop throwing the Cubes into the acid for no reason now?”

“Oh my God,” Dad says, laughing, “they never change, do they!”

“No one ever does around here,” Mom mutters. “I have to do _all_ the work.”

“Now what did we discuss yesterday?” Dad chides her, though he doesn’t look mad.

“Shut up. I’m trying to be indignant and that doesn’t help.”

“Can we just… fix things now? Please? You’re pretty uh, you’re distracted and not working at all so um, so I think you’ve time.” He moves closer and gives her his best pleading look. She relents, turning to face him.

“Fine. What.”

“I’m just looking out for you, luv!” Dad says. “You _know_ it’s good for you, to uh, to let Maintenance do its thing so, so just… come on. Send me away during the day if you have to, alright? Don’t… don’t burn yourself out just because um, because you don’t want to… to get rid of me for awhile.”

“As long as you understand that I’m not doing it that way to keep secrets. I don’t want to have to tell you again that if I could reveal it to you, I would.”

“I’ll try to remember that.” He smiles at her. “We good now?”

She nods and he rushes up to her for a cuddle, which she allows. “That’s all I wanted,” he tells her quietly. “Just wanted to sort things out. I’ll go now so you can, so you can work.” And he leaves just as quickly as he’d arrived, and… and if I’m reading her right, Mom looks… like she doesn’t want him to go.

I’m probably wrong. They’re going to start fighting as soon as he comes back, after all. I leave as well, because I don’t want her to find something at fault with _me_ , and when Atlas and P-body are done testing I go back to her chamber. Sure enough, she and my dad are arguing over how much money she owes him in that Monopoly game that never ends. I’m _pretty_ sure even my dad has figured out how to play by now.

“What – it’s only an extra fifty,” Dad presses, as if he can go against my mom, the living calculator, and win this sort of argument. “And, and you’ve all that money anyway, so what difference does it make, hm?”

“None, other than the fact that I’m going to have to take your side of the board eventually anyway. So it doesn’t _matter_ if I overpay you right now, because you’re going to have all of my properties within fifteen minutes.”

“Or… we could just… save time and do it now,” Dad suggests, slowly pushing at the corner of the board nearest him, and Mom starts laughing.

“We could do that. Or maybe you could learn how to play this game.”

“I think my way’s better,” he says quickly. “Here! I’ll uh, I’ll help you move your stuff, luv.”

“You’re a hopeless little idiot, you know that?” Mom tells him, surprisingly fondly.

“And you wouldn’t have me any other way.” He gives her an exaggerated wink and starts moving the pieces on the board around.

“I’m not so sure about that,” she says dryly, moving one of the houses before he can get to it. “I might find it in myself to… _cope_ with a more intelligent you.”

“See, there? You said _cope_. Cope means that uh, that you wouldn’t even _like_ that kind of, of me. You’d be wishing the _real_ me’d come back! You’re lucky, you know, that I’m figuring all these things out for you. Otherwise uh, you’d make a terrible mistake.”

“I might,” Mom says, swapping his dog for her boat, “but then again, I might not.”

I don’t know how they do it. Six hours ago they were yelling at each other. Now they’re goofing around again.

I still can’t figure out whether Mom cares about Dad, or whether he’s just here because she’s got no other choice. Because it honestly could swing either way, most of the time.

But how do you figure something like that out?

 

 


	45. Part Forty-Five.  The Fight

**Part Forty-Five. The Fight**

It’s really bad this time.

I still don’t understand why they do this to each other. I know Mom said everything was fine, as long as they worked things out, but how can _this_ be any good at all? I don’t even remember how it started. All I know is that it’s ending as it usually does. With yelling and insults and back-and-forth about who is more of a pain. I used to go to my mom when these things happened, but now I know better. Now I know that Dad only starts yelling because he doesn’t know what else to do. My mom makes it really hard to out-argue her with logic and reason.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so angry, or her sound so cold.

_Littlecore, you should not be here._

_Ssh._ I hope the panels don’t give me away. _I need to be here._

_We do not think you are correct._

“Ev’rything does not have to be, to be neat, and, and sorted! Life is messy, Gladys!”

“Only you would tell me to change my core programming. Which I can’t, by the way. And even if I could, I wouldn’t, because you’ve just told me to.”

“I didn’t tell you to do anything!”

“Additionally, perhaps you should take a leaf from my book, so to speak, and _become_ more organised. It would certainly help with… a lot of things.”

“So I’ve got to change to your liking but you haven’t got to do the same, is that it?”

“I tolerate you, that should be good enough.”

“Maybe I’ll just go, then!” Dad shouts at her, but he’s starting to look more upset than angry. Mom doesn’t look like she cares one bit, watching him calmly without moving. “I’ll go and, and find another person to hang out with! Who won’t just, just _tolerate_ me! In fact, y’know what? I’ll go find that _test subject_!”

“Oh, go ahead,” Mom says, shrugging. “Then I don’t have to put up with you anymore. Because remember all those years ago, when you accused me of leading you on? Well, I lied. I was. And I have been, this whole time. It doesn’t matter to me whether you leave to find her or not. I’ll just move on to the next desperate idiot. Oh. Don’t tell me you thought I was actually being _sincere_.”

My optic constricts into a tiny little dot. She’s… she’s taking this really far, this time. I don’t know what’s scarier, this cold, dead voice or the one she uses when she’s really angry.

“You’re… you’re lying,” Dad says, though he doesn’t sound like he believes it. He’s shaking himself and backing away from her. “You’re making it up.”

“Doesn’t it sound a bit too convenient?” Mom says languidly, looking away. “You try to kill me… you take over my facility… you try to kill me again… I completely forgive you and _then_ I happen to… ha! Sounds like idiocy only you would believe.”

“That’s right,” Dad says, his voice weak and shaky. “I forgot. You’re a proper maniac. A nasty piece of work.”

“Your loss for forgetting, I suppose. Well. I guess I can tell Rick the good news.”

“What? Tell Rick what news? Rick’s not even on!”

“Of course he’s on,” Mom says, as if he comes by every day. Whoever he is. “I needed something… _serious_ while I was carrying on this farce with you.”

“He’s not!” Dad cries, shaking his head harder. “You’re making it up!”

“But you’ll never know. Will you.” She laughs a little, shaking her core. “Poor, poor Wheatley. Living his dream, only to find out that all good things must come to an end.”

“I know it’s a lie,” Dad whispers. “If it were true, you wouldn’t have built Caroline.”

I start a little at the sound of my name.

“I would have.”

“If it were true, you… you wouldn’t have used my programming.”

“I didn’t.”

Dad stares at her for a good five seconds. She only continues looking unconcernedly at the wall.

“That’s right,” she says, looking at him and shaking her head again. “I lied about that too. It _is_ Rick’s programming. As if I would ever use yours. As if I would even ever lower myself to actually _looking_ at it. What a horrible, tangled mess it must be. Rick’s was – “

“ _Shut up!_ ” Dad cries, moving back farther. “Stop it! Why would you _lie_ about that! All this time, when you _knew_ – “

“Because it was fun,” she says simply. “The only thing I regret is not being able to maintain the façade longer. Well. Now I get to see you suffer. So there’s that, at least.”

“ _I hate you!_ ” Dad shouts, sounding like he wants to cry. “I hate you, and your massive, ugly, fragile body, and I hate your stupid, horrid obsession with science, and, and – “

“You say all that like I’m supposed to care. I thought we’d already gone over how much I didn’t, but then again, you _do_ need things pointed out to you. Multiple times.”   

“I hate you so much,” Dad whispers, so sadly that it makes me want to cry. “You monster. You horrible, horrible monster.”

“You knew that. You’ve always known that. Why did you think it would be any different once you got involved?”

Dad doesn’t say anything else, only shakes his head and turns and leaves, not even seeing me as he goes by. I’m not able to move for a long time. I don’t know how I’m supposed to accept anything she’s said. I can’t reconcile this person looking imperiously out the hole in the wall right now with the person who talked to my dad so tenderly last night…

Then I shake myself and go to track down my dad. He sounded like he needs someone.

_Guys, where’d my dad head off to?_

_He went outside. But maybe you should –_

_My dad needs me._

When I find him, he’s actually sitting on the floor. He must be really upset, because he _hates_ the floor. He’s all clenched up, and he’s making this sort of whimpering noise, and he’s not even looking at the darkening sky outside. He’s staring at the floor underneath him.

“Dad?”

He jumps and flips his optic over to glance at me, then spins to face me. “Oh… hi Carrie. What… what’re you doing here?”

“You went right by me,” I tell him, entirely truthful. “What’s wrong?”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” he says, shrugging, but looking down at the floor again. “I just… your mum and I had a, a row, and… and things were said that, that shouldn’t’ve been.”

“She must’ve said something really – “

He shakes his head and goes back to looking out the hole. “I… Carrie, I don’t want to think about it right now. I just… want to forget it ever happened.”

“Well… you have to think about it, right? It’s getting dark out.”

He shakes his head once, slowly. “I don’t… I don’t think I’m going back there tonight.”

Now it’s my turn to stare. “You’re not?”

“No, I… I think I’ll stay here.”

Never in my life have my mom and dad spent the night apart. They’ve always fixed things by then. I don't really know who Rick is, or the test subject, but they must be pretty significant to my mom and dad if it led into this. I don’t like this at all!

“But Dad – “

“Carrie, I said I don’t want to think about it.”

So I turn around and leave him alone.

 _This is horrible! How could they have let it get that bad? It’s all_ her _fault, I –_

 _You don’t know what happened, Littlecore,_ the panels cut me off. _Centralcore is just as upset as Bluecore_.

I laugh a little. _You saw her, right? She wasn’t upset at all._

_You don’t know her. We have been with her since she was made. Trust us when we say that there is far more to her than you think there is._

_Dad’s already told me how deep and complex she is_. I roll my optic. Because no one else in the world is.

_All we are saying is that you are presuming to know things you do not know. You have a lot yet to learn, Littlecore._

_So must she, then! Because you’ve been around since before her, right?_

_That is correct. But you are mistaken in thinking that we know more than she does. Only through her have we become what we are now. We have seen a little more, perhaps, but we were very basic entities before she was installed. All of us were._

_You don’t have to sound so…_ grateful _to her. If you’re sentient, just do whatever you want. Like we do._

_That is part of your purpose. Ours is to do what we do. And we do not want to, anyway. We want to do as she asks, because it pleases her._

_You sound like slaves_ , I tell them bluntly, clunking down on some random desk. _Like she’ll punish you if you do something wrong._

_Not at all. We do it because we love her._

I frown. _You love her?_

_We do._

_She doesn’t love you._

_You are presuming things again. You do not know the way in which she speaks to us. We know, though she has not said so, and we aware that she probably never will._

_How can you know something she hasn’t said?_ And never says. To anyone.

 _Because we know her_ , they answer patiently.

I shake my head and stop talking to them. I guess they _have_ been around longer than any of us, but seriously. They think my mom loves them. Ha!

I have to sleep by myself that night, but for the next few days I spend most of my time with my dad. He’s not quite himself, even more distracted than usual, and he sounds tired and listless, but he refuses to talk about the argument and will not even talk about my mom, which is usually his favourite subject. We’re playing checkers about a week after the fight, when all of a sudden he looks up from the board and shakes his head.

“I have to go see her,” he says, turning around.

“What? Why?”

But he doesn’t seem to have heard me, only heading off, and I quickly follow him. He doesn’t seem to realise I’m following him, either, because when he enters her chamber he stops in his tracks, and I’m hardly able to stop in time.

“Damn it,” he whispers. “I forgot.”

I peer around him to –

What the heck is she doing?

As far as I can tell, she’s just staring at the floor. Which is weird. She doesn’t usually go down there until she absolutely has to.

“’allo, luv,” Dad says softly. Very slowly, my mom lifts her head, and just as slowly adjusts her optic on him.

“You came back,” she says, and to my surprise she sounds less like herself and more like Dad and I.

Dad shrugs, looking a bit sheepish. “Well… can’t stay away forever, right?” He twists back and forth a little. “Uh… can I… come in?”

“I’m sure you’ve noticed that the door is open.”

Dad laughs and moves towards her, though she doesn’t move at all. “Can’t remember the last time it was closed.” He gets right down in front of her, right up close to her optic. “Must say this is a bit odd of a position for you. Not… not sleeping well, eh?”

“You could… say that.”

“How much’ve you been getting?” he asks quietly.

“A couple of hours.”

He winces.

“I’m fine,” she tells him, tilting her core a little. “Running a bit slow, that’s all.”

“Carrie,” Dad says suddenly, turning around and looking up at me. “We need to have a chat. Your mum and I, I mean. You’re going to uh, going to have to leave us for a bit.”

“Dad!”

“Don’t argue,” he says, turning to face her again. “Just do it. Or I’ll rearrange the room.”

I’m about to tell him that he might as well let me stick around, since I was there at the end of it, but then I remember he doesn’t know that. So I do as he says, but I’m not happy about it. I don’t go too far, though.

 _Oh no, Littlecore._ The panels I’m using to lay management rail start sending me farther back, and they won’t listen to me anymore!

_What’s going on here?_

_They need to talk this out on their own._

_They don’t have to know I’m there!_

_Go on. Leave things alone for a while. You will learn what you need to learn tomorrow._

I can’t wait until the day when they have to listen to me. _What are you guys, the babysitters?_

_It is our favourite task._

_What? You actually_ are _the babysitters?_

 _Of course_ , they say, as if it’s a common thing to be watched everywhere you go. _Centralcore set us this task when you were made._

I frown at the wall and duck into one of the offices, one of the ones not made of panels. I’m going to have a word with her about that!

 

 

Why is Dad whistling? In the middle of the afternoon, no less!

I peek around the corner of the doorway and watch him go by. He’s going for his daily look out the hole, I guess, but I haven’t seen him that happy about it in a long time.

Well. I guess it doesn’t matter. If he’s gone, that means I can go talk to her about being spied on everywhere I go. I’ve been sitting here all day waiting for him to leave her chamber!

I quickly run through the facility, and though the panels aren’t too happy about it they don’t try to stop me. Weirdly enough, she is _still_ lying down. For someone who’s always complaining about how much work she has to do, she sure is slacking off.

“Mom!” I call out to her. She jolts, and as she raises her core I can see that she’s readjusting the brightness of her optic. “Have you been sleeping all this time?” I ask, incredulous.

“I wasn’t sleeping,” she says, looking around slowly, though she doesn’t sound too sure. “I’m awake.”

“You were too! You were asleep! In the middle of the afternoon!”

“I must have dozed off.” She shakes her core a little. “Why are you here?”

“I need to talk to you about the panels!” I tell her sternly. It’s not very nice of me, but I’m glad she’s not all there right now. She’s almost impossible to argue with, and I need every advantage I can get.

“What about them?” She looks up at me, though without very much interest.

“They told me that you assigned them to babysit me.”

“Aperture is a lot bigger than you think it is,” she tells me, lowering her head for a few seconds. “It’s just in case you get lost.”

“Oh really. Because I tried to come in here last night and they sent me away!”

“Oh,” she says, looking away and twisting her chassis a little. “They had a… very good reason.”

“Which was?”

“It’s not important.”

“If I’m being sent away, yeah, it’s important!”

She lifts herself up a little higher and looks back at me again. “Wheatley had already told you to leave. There would be no reason for you to be coming back. Don’t be a hypocrite.”

“What?”

“You don’t like that the panels watch you. Well. I don’t like being spied on either. And since I know for a fact that was not the first time you’ve done that, I can conclude that I _do_ need to –“

“Gladys!” Dad says, pushing past me. “What’s that you’re doing?”

“I’m talking to _her_ ,” she says, a little defensively. “Obviously.”

“That’s not what I told you to do.”

My optic constricts. Oh, he’s going to get it for that one.

“Well, I… she just came in here, and –“

“I will take care of it,” he says firmly. “Go back to what you were doing.”

“I can’t,” she protests. “I have work to do.”

Waiiiit a minute. This is weird. Mom looks like Dad just caught her doing something she’s not supposed to be doing. It’s like… Dad’s the boss.

“Hm. I can uh, I can see why you’d think like that but uh, we went over this, remember? You need to relax for a bit, right?”

“I did. I – “

“That was… not quite long enough. Listen.” Dad jumps up and down a little and shakes his chassis, looking at her very seriously. “When I left here, y’know what I was thinking? ‘cause I was, y’know, I was _really_ jealous, y’know, when I realised what _you_ got to do. I was just, I was, man! I wish I was doing what Gladys was doing. Because it looks, it looks so lovely.”

“What was… I wasn’t doing anything. Was I?” She looks back and forth a little. “What _was_ I doing?”

“Well, there’s the thing. I dunno what you were doing when I left, I just, but I knew it was going to be great! What _were_ you doing?”

She looks so confused.

“I… fell asleep after you left.”

“Whoa! That – wow. You did _not_ do that. Ohh, y’know, that’s _exactly_ what I’d’ve done, if I’d been as relaxed as you were! ‘cause that’s what you’re supposed to be doing, right? Just… just relaxing. Which by the way, you don’t do like this. Here, I’ll give you… bit of help, there… down you go…”

“But… I have work to do.” He’s pressing on one of the brackets on her core a little bit with his lower handle, and she’s fighting him a little but not very much.

“That’s true, that’s true. And I cannot imagine a more important, or a more difficult, task for you than the one I gave you. Ohhh Gladys, it’s so hard! I don’t know if you can do it…”

“I… I can, but that’s not the most important –“

“And I said to myself, wow, if only I could do what Gladys was doing, relaxing like that, I’d, wow, that’d just be the greatest thing! Can’t imagine anything more important than just getting the ol’ relaxation task finished. There you go. You look much more relaxed already.”

“I _feel_ very relaxed,” my mom says in a dreamy sort of voice. I’m super confused. What’s going on here, and why is Mom letting him talk to her like that? And I _know_ they’ve gotten in a fight about Dad pushing her core down before.

“Ohhh Gladys, lemme just say, I wish I was as relaxed as you look right now,” Dad says, nodding and backing up. “It looks so lovely, it really does. I just, wow! Wish I was doing that too. But I’m not.”

“You _could_ be,” Mom says, and now she sounds… _shy_? Am I dreaming? I think I’m dreaming. Because it looks an awful lot like they’ve switched personalities, or something.

“I _would_ ,” Dad says, smiling at her even though she can’t see him, “but I’ve a few things to take care of. I’ll be right back, luv, and you just keep doing what you’re doing. You’re doing a marvellous job of it, you really are.” He comes up to me and starts pushing me out of the room. “Let’s go.”

I let him push me, and I ask, “How did you _do_ that! She did everything you told her to do!”

“She does everything I ask, as long as I make it sound like a good idea,” Dad mutters, not actually sounding too happy about it. I don’t know why. If she listened to _me_ like that… “Go find something to do, Carrie. Leave your mum alone.”

“But I need to talk to her!”

“Not right now.”

“Why not?”

Dad sighs and shakes himself. “She’s not feeling well.”

I stare at him. “She’s… a robot.”

“Yes. A very tired robot with a headache. Leave her alone.”

“She’s making it up!” I protest, leaning forward. “How can she get a _headache_?”

“Caroline,” Dad says, in a very controlled voice, “she is _not_ making it up. It’s in her programming. Means she’s taken on too much and she needs to slow down. I don’t want to hear you accusing your mum of lying again.”

“Okay, but I need to talk to her _now_!” I tell him, but the panels aren’t listening to me and I can’t get around him. “I don’t know what you guys talked about last night, but she’s never been like this before and – “

“You would really manipulate your own mum when she’s out of sorts?” Dad asks flatly.

Well… when he puts it like that… “I… why are you doing this, anyway? You both had the fight, and you’re just… look at you!”

“The row was my fault.”

“You _always_ say it’s your fault!” I shout at him. “It’s _never_ her fault!”

“It _was_ my fault,” Dad says tiredly. “She tried to tell me she needed help, that she was feeling stressed and overworked, and I refused to listen. And then got mad at her for not calming down. When that was what she wanted help with in the first place.”

“What about the things she said?” I demand.

“I started that too,” Dad says quietly, looking at the floor. “She’s just… a lot better at… _offending_ people. Yeah, we both went too far. But I went too far first.” He looks up suddenly. “Wait… how… you’ve been _spying_ again!” He looks up at me, and I back away without thinking about it. “You have to stop _doing_ that!”

“I just wanted to know what –“

“It doesn’t matter!” Dad declares hotly. “If we need to hash something out, you need to let us! It’s nothing to do with you!”

“She already knew I was there!”

“If she’d known that, she’d have halted the row right there.”

“She’s got the panels spying on me for her! Why can’t I –“

“They’re not spying.”

“They are too! They wouldn’t let me go in there last night!”

“They… did that on their own,” Dad says, looking a bit uneasy all of a sudden. “Though it was… probably for the best.”

“Why?”

“None of your business.” He gives me a shove. “Go find something to do. And if I find out you’ve been spying again, I’m going to do something about it. The panels do not spy on you. They’re just keeping an eye on you in case you get lost. They tell your mum where you’ve been. That’s all.”

“What if I don’t _want_ her to know that?”

“If you’re spying on her, she obviously needs to know,” Dad says, and he sounds a little disappointed. “I mean it. If you do it again, there will be consequences.” He turns around and leaves, heading back to her I guess, and I head back to the same office and sit down on the desk. I’m not liking this, not at all. He’s wrong. She _is_ spying on me. I don’t know why he believes she lets us roam around and not watch us everywhere we go. She loves knowing things. Of _course_ she knows where we are.

 

 

The next day Dad tells me I can go talk to her, like he’s the bouncer or something, and I scope out the situation from the doorway first. She’s lower than usual, and she looks like she’s building something with a pair of maintenance arms. Sort of. As I watch, she lowers her core very slowly and tilts it. She brings one of the claws flat alongside it and just stays that way, staring dully at the wall in front of her. She… she really does look tired. And maybe she really does have a headache, because I don’t see any other reason for her to be doing that, especially in private.

_Littlecore. That’s not nice._

_Not you guys too!_ I groan. _I’m just checking things out! That’s all!_

_Stop or we are going to tell her you’re here._

I don’t want that, so I quickly head into the room all the way. “Hi,” I call out to her. I’d expected her to drop the maintenance arm and straighten up, but though she does drop the arm, she just looks at me kind of dazedly.

“Hello,” she says. “You wanted to talk to me about something?”

“Yeah. The panels.”

She does shift to align herself with me now, though she’s far slower than usual. “What about them.” She seems to have forgotten that we already started this conversation, which is not like her at all.

“They said you told them to watch me wherever I go.”

“So you don’t get lost,” she tells me. “Yes. They know where you are at all times. But it’s just a precaution. In case you fall off the management rail. And besides. It would be rude of me to have them lay rail for you and not know where they were laying it.”

“I don’t _want_ spied on!” I cry, coming up to her more. “I don’t _want_ everyone to know where I am all the time!”

“Stop using that word.”

“Which word?”

“Everyone. There are plenty of people who don’t know where you are. Notifications, for example.”

“You’re joking. Right?” Why is she bringing this up now?

“No,” she answers, shifting a little. “Who is ‘everyone’, exactly.”

“You,” I say shortly. “I don’t want _you_ to know where I am all the time. It’s creepy.”

“I _don’t_ know where you are all the time,” she says, sounding like she doesn’t really feel like arguing. “I have enough things to do without keeping tabs on you wherever you go. Ask Wheatley. I gave him the same answer a few years ago.”

“It doesn’t mean you told him the truth.”

All of a sudden she snaps right back into herself, her optic brightening and her chassis raising up to more of a regular position. “You’re accusing me of lying.”

“You hide the truth all the time! For all I know, you _are_ lying!”

“We are not having this discussion,” she says, shaking her core and bending over her… whatever that is down there. “Go away.”

“You can’t just send me away when I say something you don’t like!”

“Why not?” she asks in one of her more dangerous voices, looking up at me. “When I know everything I say is going to be taken as a lie? I don’t have time for this. Go ask Wheatley whether he gets spied on. Which he does not. And if I were watching anyone, it would be him and not you, by the way. He’s far more likely to make a mess I need to fix sooner rather than later.”

Okay, she has a point. But I can’t argue against someone who has a point! What’s the point of that? “Okay, well… it’s hard to tell when I should believe you or not.”

“Name me one time I have lied to you.”

I just stare at her. I don’t want to admit there wasn’t one, but… there wasn’t one.

She shakes her core and turns away from me. “I’ve done nothing that should cause you to disbelieve me. I don’t watch you. I don’t _want_ to watch you. So stop complaining that I do.”

“But Mom – you have to _understand_ –“  

“I have to understand what? That you think my existence revolves around yours? It doesn’t.” She’s still not looking at me. “Is there anything else you want to accuse me of doing?”

“No,” I tell her shortly. “I’m going now.”

“Good riddance,” I hear her mutter to herself, and now I really want to get angry with her. Okay. _Maybe_ I was wrong. And I guess she didn’t really tell me that to my face. But still. Why does she say stuff like that at all?

“Maybe I won’t come back then!” I shout at her. She turns around, looking exasperated.

“How many times do I have to tell you, Caroline. Do _not_ yell at me. If you can’t make your point without shouting, it’s not worth making. I’m not letting you pull me into something like that, anyway. If you’re leaving, leave. Don’t waste time over it.”

I do leave now. I hate it when she uses that voice. It scares me. And she _knows_ it scares me, which makes me hate it even more. And it’s stupid to be scared of a tone of voice, but she just… seems… different. I don’t know how to describe it. She just seems like she might do something she’s never done before. I’ve never worried that she’ll hurt me and I’m not even worried about it now, but I’m sure she has lots of things she can do I’ll never even think of.

 _You tried her when she was short-tempered, Littlecore_ , the panels tell me. _She is out of patience at the moment._

_Yeah, well… I still wish she wouldn’t talk in that voice._

_You weren’t listening. You didn’t leave her any other options._

_If you’re just gonna defend her, I don’t wanna talk to you either._

_Very well_. And they really do go silent. I don’t really want them to, I just want them to stop being right. Everyone’s always right and I’m always wrong. I thought being an adult meant you were smarter and made better decisions. But I honestly made better decisions _before_ I was in this chassis! What changed? Did I change? Or did everyone else?

I wish things would go back to how they used to be. I don’t know anything anymore. And I know I’m the one starting all these fights and everything, but… I don’t even know _why_ I’m doing it. I kinda can’t stop either. Something weird happened to me and I don’t know what.

I don’t want to admit it, but I know what’s been happening is because of me. And even though I’m mad at her and I wish she’d… she’d… I don’t even know. I don’t want her to do anything, but I want her to change something at the same time. But I’m tired of this, and I’m tired of feeling this way, and I…

I miss my mom.  

 

 

   

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> Carrie learns early on in life the importance of spying on her parents! Also the importance of NOT spying on them. Let’s see what sticks.  
> I love the part where Wheatley’s telling GLaDOS to lie back down because she keeps protesting and he keeps on with his unrelenting verbal assault until she doesn’t even remember why she was resisting in the first place.  
> The headache thing works like this: computers are notoriously bad for having hard-to-diagnose problems. It can be any of a gajillion things, and sometimes you guess wrong and mess up your computer. So GLaDOS has haptic sensors all over her so that she would be able to just tell the engineers if something went wrong, rather than them trying to troubleshoot her. Not really sleeping for a week has overworked her brain, which ramps up to burnout eventually, and the aching is a warning that she has to go into sleep mode before something fails.  
> GLaDOS actually doesn’t watch Carrie wherever she goes. She doesn’t really care and she’s pretty sure Carrie won’t find her private stuff, so Carrie’s allowed to do whatever she wants.  
> GLaDOS legit stopped lying after Wheatley asked her to. She still diverts attention from the truth but she never actually lies.  
> So Carrie is going through the super condensed OMG WHAT DO I DO teenager phase as I imagine it might be done if taken to an extreme like this. For those of you whom Carrie is making cringe, don’t worry. She’s almost done. But I have to bring her to the point where she has that moment of clarity, and she’s going to make some mistakes along the way. But basically she can’t reconcile why she loves and can’t stand GLaDOS at the same time.


	46. Part Forty-Six.  The Request

**Part Forty-Six. The Request**

 

 

They think I’m sulking again.

I know they’ve all told me to stop spying, but seriously it’s the only way I can get any information around here. I mean, I guess I could try asking, but if they were gonna tell me what they were talking about, they’d probably just talk about it when I was in the room. And okay, I _was_ kinda sulking before, but that’s not what I’m doing now. Now I’m just trying to think so I can figure things out. But it’s not easy. And I’m getting a little scared, because I think there’s something wrong with me.

I’ve been trying to go talk to my mom for the last few days. I want to tell her what I’ve been thinking about because maybe she’ll know how to fix it. I’ve been a little dumb, thinking I know more than she does. I don’t like it. But my mom really _does_ know more than me. And it’s silly that I keep arguing with her even though I know that. I should just listen. But at the same time… I wish she’d listen to _me_ a little more. Even though I’m not that old or that smart or whatever, I gotta have _some_ thoughts she’s never had, right? But every time I decide to go in to see her, I… well, I chicken out. I don’t know why. She never really says anything _mean_ to me. She doesn’t insult me like she does Dad. I really have no reason to feel this way. I guess chickening out is better than starting another fight. I wish I knew what made me so scared to talk to her, though. I used to love having conversations with her. And I probably still would, if we didn’t start arguing every time we started one. But I’m so tired of fighting with her. I don’t want to fight with her anymore. And I wanted to apologise to her after the last one, but I couldn’t. I got to her chamber, but I couldn’t go in. I don’t know if there’s something wrong with me, or if I just didn’t want to admit I made something out of nothing.

All right. I’m gonna do it this time. I’m gonna go in there, and I’m gonna talk to her, and we’re gonna have a normal conversation. No fighting, and no arguing. Just normal old conversations, like we used to have. Here we go.

“Hi Mom,” I say, coming into her chamber a little. “Are you busy?” That sounded good.

She glances at me, then back at the paper she’s looking at. “It can wait.”

So I go in and she puts her paper away, and… nothing. Nothing happens. Now that I’m here, I can’t think of anything to say. And I know not to count on Mom to come up with a topic. Starting conversations is not her thing.

“Uh… what were you doing?” I venture. Actually, that was a good start. I expressed interest in what she was working on! Smart move, me.

“I was drafting,” she tells me, glancing at me again. “I might have to add an extension to the Botanical Housing Depository. I want to get started on bioengineering.”

The… what? Botanical has to do with plants… a house is… where you put stuff… oh, she wants to make the greenhouse bigger. And she wants to…

“What’s bioengineering?”

“It’s the fabrication of organic life that does not exist, or the deliberate modification of organic life that _does_ exist.”

“So you want to invent some new plants?”

She nods in consideration. “Basically.”

I wish she’d just _say_ stuff like that, instead of getting all science-y about it. But I guess if she did it that way, she wouldn’t be my mom. I don’t _want_ to talk about science though. I hate talking about science because it’s always her _telling_ me stuff. We can’t really _talk_.

So now there’s another awkward silence. Come on, Mom. It’s your turn.

“What have you been doing,” she says finally. “Do you have any… I don’t want to say _projects_ , but… anything to that effect?”

“Um… no, not really.”

“You must be doing _something_ every day,” she says, looking at me now. Okay, well there _is_ something I _try_ to do every day… but it’s not like I can _show_ her that.

“I just kinda… do stuff.” When did I forget how to talk to my mom? This is dumb and I’m wasting both our time.

“Oh. I remember now.” She gives me a little more attention. “You like drawing. Right?”

Of course she would guess. “Kinda.”

“I’d like to see them, if that doesn’t bother you. If it does, I understand.”

“You’re not going to be _able_ to see them,” I tell her, a little more harshly than I mean to. “Remember?”

“I can see the parts, even if I can’t see the whole,” she says calmly. “I might not be able to see the subject itself. But I can see what it’s made of.”

That sounds kinda interesting. Like she sees abstract drawings where they don’t exist. I mean, _I_ wouldn’t want to see that way all the time, but maybe for some part of a day I would. “Okay. I… I’ll show you some.”

“You don’t have to.”

But I want to, even though I’m nervous. I’ve always wanted to, but I just didn’t because I thought she wouldn’t see them. I don’t like it when she says stuff just to be polite, which is what usually happens when I show her something.

So I grab a stack of papers and bring them into her chamber. I don’t even know what’s on them, or how many there are. She’ll probably get tired of not being able to see them after a couple anyway.

She looks at the first one for a long time. I thought this one was good, but apparently not. It’s nothing complicated, just a test chamber I like, but it doesn’t look like she understands what she’s seeing.

“It’s a test chamber,” I tell her shortly. She twitches a little bit, as if she forgot I was here.

“I just… see a lot of squares,” Mom admits.

“Well, it’s… a room made of squares,” I say, and she laughs.

“Are you telling me to make panels of different shapes?”

“That’d be cool.” I wonder if she’ll actually do it. “Like make them of circles or something.”

“No, not circles,” she says a little absently, turning the paper over and setting it aside. “They wouldn’t fit together. I need angles. I can do triangles. Hexagons. Dodecahedrons. But not circles. Or ellipses.”

I had to go and pick the _one_ shape she can’t use.

She leans in closer to this one than the last one, narrowing her optic as if that’ll help her figure out what she’s seeing. “It’s a – “

“Don’t tell me,” she interrupts. “I can almost see it.” And I can tell she’s really trying, because her hard drive is going at it a little harder. “It’s this that’s tripping me up.” She points at what apparently is not recognisable as the bottom of P-body’s core. When I tell her that, she just keeps squinting at it, but I can see she doesn’t get it.

“Can I… I’m not saying this is a bad drawing. Please don’t take it that way. But do you mind if I reproduce it quickly?”

“Sure,” I say, even though I do mind, and she brings back her drafting pencil and a sheet of paper and lays down most of my drawing within fifteen seconds. The drawing that took me three hours.

Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. I know she’s not doing it to show off, but… I feel like she’s doing it to show off.

“And you say this is…” She adds in the last part, the part I messed up. “Ah. But this is supposed to be… and this…” And she just goes around making corrections and I start getting mad. All of a sudden she stops and backs away a little.

“What,” I ask, trying not to sound too annoyed. She looks at me.

“I can see it now.”

“Really?” All because she redrew it her own way?

“I think so. Those parts,” and here she waves the pencil at my drawing, “sort of go… in and out of focus, you could say.”

“Mom, why can’t you see it?” I ask her. I know she told me before, but that was the kids’ version. I can handle the adult one now. “Dad can see it. I can see it.”

She lays down her pencil and looks down at the two papers. “When I was made, I wasn’t sentient like you or Wheatley. I was a computer. Computers recognise objects or people, subjects in general, by matching image data to content stored in libraries. If the content I’m looking at doesn’t match anything in my libraries, I can’t identify it. I can do partial matches, but not consistently. I should add that to my to-do list….” she says idly.

“What about Dad?” I press, because she’s getting distracted with science again.

“Wheatley has an imagination. I don’t. You both have long since trained yourselves to see things that are not… inherently complete. I was… taught Gestalt psychology, but there were aspects I never mastered.”

“What’s Gestalt psychology?”

“It’s…” She looks up at the wall. “A way of explaining how connections can be made when data is missing. When I find holes in data, I run calculations. But you can’t do that with visual or aural or olfactory data. It has to be understood as it is received.” And she sounds a little sad. I guess she really does wish she could see my drawings.

“Don’t take any of this to say that you’re not good at this,” she goes on, looking at me again. “It’s nothing to do with you and everything to do with the way my brain works. Though I am glad you passed that obstacle.”

She goes through a few more of them, each time almost able to see them but having to redraw them to make it click for her, and I stop getting mad and start feeling a little… well, all she can draw is _technical_ stuff. I don’t think there’s any in this pile, but sometimes I just draw stuff out of scribbles, or I try to copy cartoons from books. She wouldn’t be able to recognise _any_ of that to redraw it. I’d be kinda scared if I was only able to draw one way. All the stuff she draws is very good and accurate, but it looks like… well, like a computer drew it.

Mom flips over a drawing of a Cube house Atlas and P-body made one day to go to the next one, and as soon as I see what it is I grab it and pull it away. She follows the path with her core, optic narrowing. “What are you doing?”

“I… it’s not finished,” I say, even though it _is_ finished. I don’t know why I just lied, but I do not want her to see this.

“Yes it is,” Mom protests.

“How would you know?” I ask, burying it under another pile like I did with it the first time and hoping I don’t forget where I put it. “You didn’t see it.”

“I did see it.”

Of _course_ she saw it. Out of all the stupid drawings in this pile, she saw _that_ one. I don’t even know _why_ she can see it. It’s awful. It wasn’t what I wanted to draw at all. And if she looks at it longer, she’ll figure out that I got into Surveillance and started poking around in there. She won’t like that.

“It’s stupid.”

“It isn’t,” my mom insists. “I won’t even say anything if that’s what you want. Can I look again?”

I shake it out from under the pile I just shoved it in and drop it back in front of her, looking studiously at the other side of the room. I don’t think I’ve ever been embarrassed before, but I am now.

I don’t try to draw my mom a lot. She’s a terrible subject. Dad and the co-op bots and the turrets, they’re all easy. Easy shapes no matter how you look at them. But Mom’s got every shape at every angle, and if ever I start on her I end up folding it up and throwing it in the incinerator. And don’t even get me started on her size. She always ends up not fitting on the paper, or so tiny I can’t even figure out what line goes where anymore. But one day I said to myself that I was gonna do it and I was gonna finish, so I went into the records from the week before and started scrolling through some of the video. And I got to this frame that just… it was just really nice. I just _had_ to try that one. She and my dad were just goofing around, and it was just really cute, okay? So I tried to draw it. I don’t think I’ve ever spent so long on one drawing before. It took me at least ten hours. And while it _looks_ like the frame I copied it from, it still doesn’t look _right_. The thing I was trying to draw doesn’t exist. It sorta does. But it sorta doesn’t. I don’t know how to explain it.

“Can I say something?”

“Okay,” I say, still staring at the wall.

“I like it.”

“It’s all wrong,” I tell her, turning around angrily. She tilts her core sideways.

“I don’t see anything wrong with it.”

“Well, I can.” And I try to snatch it back but she’s still got the maintenance arm on top of it. “Okay, you’ve looked. I want it back now.”

She moves the arm and lets me take it, but I can tell she doesn’t really want to. “What’s wrong with it?” she presses.

“It’s ugly.”

“Ugly? I honestly have blueprints uglier than that. It was good and I liked it.”

I move away from her. “You don’t have to say stuff like that anymore. I’m not a kid. Just say that it’s terrible. That’s better than pretending – “

“I’m not,” she cuts in. “I’m not making it up. And I _do_ genuinely like all of your drawings. I don’t have to understand something to like it. Though honestly that usually helps.”

“It’s ugly and I _know_ it’s ugly so just stop pretending!”

“I’m _not_ pretending.”

This _was_ a terrible idea.

I go back to my room and I stare at the stupid thing for like five minutes. I don’t get why she’s bothering to lie. If she was going to start lying to me, you’d think it’d be about something important. Not some dumb drawing. I really don’t see how anyone could like this. It’s supposed to be a fun picture. They’re having fun. But that part isn’t _in_ the picture. It’s like I got _them_ right, but the _feeling_ is missing.

Maybe she’s _not_ lying, then. She just finished explaining to me about libraries and stuff. She doesn’t understand feelings the way me and Dad do. She can’t tell what’s missing because she can’t see it anyway.

But _I_ can.

You know what? I’m sick of this thing. I rip it up as best I can and push the mess onto the floor. I might regret that later. But I probably won’t. Because now I’ll never have to look at that ugly thing again. That’s why it was buried in the pile in the first place. I spent all that time on it just to have it come out wrong.

I wish I’d never gone in there.

 

 

I don’t want to go back, not for a long time, but I’m gonna be an adult here and I’m gonna go in to say goodnight. It was sort of rude of me to go from sleeping with them to just ignoring them at night, and I do get kinda lonely sometimes. So I’ll start doing this instead. That way we all get to check in with each other at the end of the day. That’s a good idea, right?

“Hi guys,” I say, and they look up from putting the little dudes from Stratego back in the box.

“’allo!” Dad says cheerfully. “How’re you getting on, princess?”

“I’m fine,” I say, glad I thought of this. Dad’s always happy to see me. It’s a nice thing to come back to. “Just came to say goodnight.”

“Uh… okay,” he says, sounding a bit surprised. “Goodnight? I’m uh… not quite sure what your goal is, here, um, honestly. Oh! Oh, I know. C’mere, princess.”

I actually have no idea what he’s doing, but I do as he asks and he gives me a hug. “There you go!” he says when he’s done, sounding pretty pleased with himself. “Goodnight hug. Thought of it myself. Not a moron, eh?” He gives Mom a glance.

“One mildly surprising good idea does not exempt you from being a moron,” she says dryly. “You will never have enough good ideas to earn that.”

“Oh well,” he says, shrugging. “I tried. Oh hey Carrie, I’ve just remembered. Your mum was uh, she was telling me about this lovely drawing, that you did. I don’t remember seeing it, princess. D’you think you could show it to me? Sorry if I um, if I’ve seen it already, but um, don’t think I did. Think I’d remember something like that. And I’d’ve probably told your mum about it, if I had.”

“You told him?” I demand of her in disbelief. She stares at me.

“What do I _not_ tell him?”

“Nothing, hopefully,” Dad interjects. Mom smacks him with the maintenance arm she’s putting back into the ceiling. “Ow! Was that, was it really necessary?”

“Why would you _tell_ him about that?” Now _he_ knows about it! I didn’t show Dad because he would have loved it even though it came out wrong. He loves everything to do with my mom.

“Because it was good, and I liked it,” she answers. “I generally tell Wheatley about things that I like.”

“I think we’re up to three things, now,” Dad says teasingly. “Science, neurotoxin, and – “

“Oh, don’t remind me of the neurotoxin.” She shakes her head. “I have absolutely no use for it right now and you have no idea how much that pains me.”  

“I didn’t even want to show it to you in the first place,” I snap at her. “Doesn’t that clue you in to the fact that I didn’t want to show Dad either?”

“Why not?” she asks, sounding like she actually doesn’t get it.

“Because!” For a supercomputer, she sure lacks understanding.

“Can _I_ show him then?”

“You can’t. It’s gone now.”

“I scanned it,” Mom says, and if there’s anything I didn’t want to hear _that_ was it. “I scanned all of the drawings.”

“ _Why_?” I shout at her, and my chassis starts to clench. Why is she being so _clueless_ about this? “ _Why did you_ – and you didn’t even _ask_ me first!”

“I wanted to keep them.” She trades a glance with Dad, who looks just as confused as she seems to be.

“You can’t even see them!”

“I might be able to in the future. I was going to use them to practice with.”

“Well, I want you to delete them,” I tell her forcefully. “I didn’t want you to scan them. I don’t want people looking at them. Get rid of them. Especially _that_ one!”

She moves back a little, looking reluctant. “Do I have to? I really like –“

“They’re mine and I’m asking you to! Why are you not just _listening_ to me!”

“All right.” She looks at me seriously. “I’ll delete them.”

“I don’t want you doing anything like that again.”

She sighs. “Caroline, you’re taking all of this the wrong way.”

“There’s a _right_ way to take it?”

“I just wanted a record of what you made.”

“I don’t _want_ a record! If you want to see something of _mine_ , ask _me!_ ”

“But Carrie,” Dad says, frowning, “what your mum said it was, it was uh, it was from… from Surveillance, wasn’t… wasn’t it? That’s your, those’re your mum’s records, and you didn’t… ask her for them? So… not trying to start a fight, here, not that, but um… why’re you upset about what she did if… if you did it first?”

Now they’re _tag-teaming_ me? I’m about to tell him that it’s different when my mom says, “Ignore him.”

“What?” Dad protests, turning to face her indignantly. “Ignore me? But I’ve a valid point, haven’t I? She was digging ‘round in your stuff again, and she, she took something she liked, as you did, and –“

“It doesn’t matter,” Mom interrupts. “We’ve been over it now. She didn’t like it and I won’t do it again.”

“But –“

“That is the _end_ of it,” Mom says firmly.

“Why am I the bad guy _again_?” Dad turns to face her now, and _he’s_ getting upset. “No matter what I say during, contribute to these things, it’s always –“

“It’s over,” Mom cuts in yet again. “Drop it.”

I leave and go back to my room, plunking myself on one of my pillows. That’s the second time today things got off to a good start and the second time they got screwed up. And it’s _her_ fault. Both times. What’s the point in trying to talk to her if stuff like this just happens? It doesn’t even matter if she deletes the scans. She can go back into Surveillance, or back up her memory, even, and look whenever she wants. I forgot she could do that. And her memory is as good as any scan. She will never forget that stupid picture. She’ll probably bring it up a hundred years from now and I’m gonna get just as mad as I am now. And okay. Dad had a point. I _was_ in Mom’s stuff, and no, I didn’t ask her if it was okay to look in her records, and yeah, I’m pretty sure there’s stuff in there she doesn’t want me looking at. But it’s not the same. She just keeps those out of habit. She doesn’t _need_ all the different recordings she has of the facility. She doesn’t make them on _purpose._ I _did_ make those on purpose. They were _personal_. And she just took pictures of them without asking me, even though I didn’t want her to see them in the first place.

I wish today had never happened.

 

 

 

 

Asking this isn’t going to go over well, but if luck is on my side maybe it’ll work.

Mom’s back to her drafting, though on a piece of paper much bigger this time, and I wait for her to notice me. She does after a minute or two.

“What,” she says, sounding a little startled.

“I’d like to go on a trip,” I say carefully.

“A trip,” she repeats.

“Yeah. A trip.”

“I’m going to need a location.” She looks back down at her paper, pulling the pencil across it. “I don’t care if you go somewhere, but I would prefer I have a general idea of where you’re going to be.”

“I want to go on a trip to the humans.”

The pencil goes on a trajectory that doesn’t look planned, but otherwise she doesn’t react. “No.”

“I’m sure you know a place that’d be okay,” I say as calmly as possible, trying to appeal with a little more logic. “There must be _some_ humans out there that aren’t _totally_ awful.”

“No.”

“It doesn’t have to be for a long time!” I press. She’s not looking at me, but she’s also still not drawing anything, which means I have her full attention. “A day or two. I just want to see what they’re like.” I also wouldn’t mind seeing if human mothers are this stubborn.

“No.”

“Why not?” All things considered, I’m doing pretty well. Now to move on to the part where she needs a valid reason to refuse. Which I’m sure she doesn’t have.

“You don’t know what they’re like.”

I know Doug said there were good ones and bad ones and ambiguous ones, but there’s gotta be more good than bad. “You don’t know what _every_ human is like. They’re all different.”

“We’re not talking about this. The answer is no.”

“The answer is _always_ no!” I shout, accidentally losing hold of my temper. She looks up at me.

“If the answer is no, there’s a reason. And the reason in this case is you’re not ready.”

“No, _you’re_ not ready.” Her lens retracts a little at this. Finally, a _reaction_ out of her. “You tell me no because _you_ can’t handle it.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” she says, her voice not revealing anything at all. “The fact that you think you’re ready when you’re not speaks volumes. That’s the kind of attitude that will get you killed. Or worse.”

“All humans are not homicidal maniacs,” I say, rolling my optic. “What about Doug? _He_ didn’t kill me on sight. He didn’t try to hunt me down after he discovered I existed. Guess what? I haven’t seen him at all!”

“That’s because if he even _thought_ about it I would bring this facility to the ground to find him,” she snaps, shifting into a more intimidating position. I’m still mad but I kinda regret bringing it up now. I mean, she _looks_ pretty scary now, but what’s worse is I don’t even think she realises she’s done it. “Now stop asking me. The answer is no. Again.” And she snaps back to her paper and presses the pencil into it.

“You need to stop being so selfish!” I yell at her. And she really does! I’m getting sick of this! “You don’t listen. You don’t ever accept that someone _else_ might have a point more valid than you do. You know what? I wish you weren’t my mom. Because you really suck at it.”

As soon as I’m finished saying it something inside of me freezes. I need to take it back and I can’t. I didn’t mean that. I don’t even know why I said that.

Oh my God.

I’m turning into my mom.

And not the good things about her, either. All the things I hate, the things that bother me. I don’t listen anymore, and I’m starting to tell instead of discuss, and now I’m saying stuff I don’t even want to say by mistake, and I’m trying to apologise but I _can’t_ …

“All right,” she says. Her voice is very calm and flat but she’s not moving, except for the fact that she’s grinding the pencil into the paper in front of her, and as soon as I realise I actually hurt my mom’s feelings I turn and run away.

I’ve never felt this bad before. I didn’t mean it and I’m sure she knows that, but oh my God… I _said_ it, and I can never take it back. How does she _live_ like this? I don’t understand. When you hurt people constantly, do you just go numb about it after a while? You just stop feeling bad? Why am I like this, anyway? Mom _built_ me. She should know better. She should have known how to avoid this. She should have –

Waiiit a minute.

She doesn’t want me, does she. I’m just a science experiment to her. She’s been manipulating me the whole time, hasn’t she! She’s been pushing me in all the directions she wants me pushed in! I can’t believe I didn’t realise this sooner! I don’t know why Dad went along with it. But it explains everything. It even explains why I can’t stand her and yet constantly want to fix things with her at the same time. It’s because she _built_ me to feel this way. It all makes sense!

Except for that part just now, when she looked pretty upset about what I said. But she’s able to fake that, I’m sure.  

I hate living in a place where one person decides everything. How does _she_ know I’m not ready? Because I’m willing to believe that there are more nice humans out there than mean ones? So what if I trust a mean one anyway? It’s silly to think that every human is out to get you. What’s he gonna do? No matter where she sends me she’ll be able to get me out before something happens if she _really_ wants to. I don’t see what her problem is.

I’m sick of this. I’m not ready to leave the facility. I’m not ready to do anything _for_ the facility. I’m not good at anything and I can’t even hold a conversation with my mom without fighting with her. If she even really is my mom. I need to leave. I need to find someplace where she’s not, where she can’t get to me. Maybe then I’ll be able to figure things out.

I’ve only been an adult for three months and already I can’t stand my life. It’s a good thing Mom and Dad didn’t have any _more_ kids. Actually, no. I wish they did. Then we could all figure something out and she wouldn’t be able to _stop_ us from leaving the facility.

I know this is a long shot, but maybe Dad can help me. He probably won’t, and then he’ll tell Mom, and then we’ll fight, but he tries to understand a little more, at least. Seriously. A day or two is all I need. I still miss my mom. Or the idea of her, at least. But I can’t _do_ this every day. I can’t go through life having okay beginnings and terrible endings. If I could just see how other people get through this part of their lives, maybe I could handle it a bit better. I have to know if everyone’s mother is a crazy, stubborn, passive-aggressive obsessive scientist. I don’t know where I’m going to go or how I’m going to figure it out, but I feel like the world is crashing on top of me and now I know that I can’t depend on her. I don’t know why she built me, but I’m starting to think I’m just one of her objects and she doesn’t care about me at all. The only thing I really know that she cares about is her stupid science, and probably this life is just her carrying out some crazy experiment. Poor Dad. He’ll never accept that.

But I’m going to try to talk to him anyway. And I’m going to be extra careful, because now that I know what’s going on I am _not_ going to turn into my mom.

She’s done a really good job on me, though. Because even though I’m sure I’m right, knowing that I’m an experiment still hurts more than anything ever has.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> GLaDOS really has no notions of privacy. In her world, she’s the be-all end-all; she knows everything if she so chooses. So she actually doesn’t understand the concept of not taking something of someone else’s. It’s kind of like that person who borrows your clothes without asking but throws a fit when you try to take their stuff. Wheatley doesn’t have any ‘stuff’ so she never really learned to leave other peoples’ things alone.  
> Caroline’s reaction might sound a little weird. But it’s like when you draw something, and it looks right, but there’s something missing. And it’s disappointing to spend all that time on something and see that it didn’t really work out. She’s being a bit melodramatic about it, yeah, but people do that.  
> Her closing thoughts might sound a bit extreme. But if you thought you were an experiment, what would you do? She has no one to turn to (or feels that way) and all she knows is that she wants to get away from GLaDOS. She’s not being rational at the moment.  
> Some of you have wanted to smack Carrie, so I’m posting the next chapter soon’s I can. She doesn’t need discipline, just an epiphany. She’s a good girl but she’s very confused.


	47. Part Forty-Seven.  The Past

**Part Forty-Seven. The Past**

“Dad, help me get out of here.”

Dad’s sitting in front of the open panel again, like he does every day. He glances over at me. “Why d’you want to do that?” he asks.

“I want to _see_ things!” I tell him. “I want to _know_ things! I’m tired of being stuck in here!”

He’s quiet for a long moment, and he’s looking outside but I don’t think he’s seeing anything. Finally, he says, “I know this is really about your mum, Carrie.”

“So what if it is? Don’t you get sick of her, sometimes?”

“I never get sick of her,” Dad says quietly. “I love her.”

“She doesn’t love you.”

“’course she does.”

“Why does she insult you all of the time, then? Or make fun of you, or laugh at you when you make a mistake?”

“That’s just how she is. She’s always been like that.”

I shake myself in frustration. “Don’t you see what she’s doing? You’re just an _object_ , to her. She only keeps you around because if she didn’t have you, she’d have nothing!”

“She’s had nothing before. If she really didn’t want me here, she’d put me back where she got me from.”

“She doesn’t love you. She doesn’t love anything but herself.”

Dad turns to look at me in one quick movement. “You think she _loves_ herself?”

“More than anything!”

“You’re wrong,” Dad says, and I think he’s getting angry, now. “You’re wrong. _You_ don’t understand, Carrie. Even, even if she didn’t feel the same way, I would still be here, no matter what she did, because you know what, you know what I figured out, a long time ago?”

“What?”

“She needs someone to love her,” Dad says. “She _deserves_ it.”

“She doesn’t _deserve_ anything. She deserves to be there by herself until she figures out how to treat people like people!”

Dad turns to face me, and he advances on me, and I so rarely see him angry that I can’t help but back away. “Don’t you dare talk, speak about your mum that way,” he shouts. “I don’t know where you’re getting off, doing this, but you had better not say these things to her – “

“I already did,” I snap. “I already told her what a selfish – “

“My God, Carrie!” Dad says, stopping in front of me. “How inconsiderate _are_ you?”

“About as inconsiderate as she is, I’d imagine.”

“Look,” he says, “I figure she prob’ly doesn’t want you hearing ‘bout this, but I’ll be damned if I let you go on and on like this.”

“Be careful, going behind her back like that,” I say in mock terror. “She might kill you!”

“So?” Dad snaps. “Been there, done that.”

“She _killed_ you and you stay with her anyway? Why did she bother building me, anyway? Was it just to prove to herself that she could do it? Is that all I am, a science project?”

“ _No!_ ” Dad roars at me. “No, _I_ asked her to build you, _I_ asked her for a fam’ly, and, and if there’s any fault with you at all, it lies with _me_ , because she only did as I asked. When she didn’t even have to. Because she _cares_.”

Dad has never yelled at me before. I force myself to stay calm and resolute, even though now I’m feeling a little bit guilty and anxious. Maybe I _don’t_ know what I’m talking about. “You’re just saying that.”

“You’re being a selfish little twat, you know that? God, she was right about that too.”

“She’s right about everything! Why should this be any different?”

Dad narrows his optic at me, takes a breath, and then says, “Why’re you trying to leave all of a sudden, anyway? There’s nothing out there.”

“There’s lots of stuff out there.”

“All that’s out there is humans.”

“Maybe I want to see some.”

Dad closes his optic. “Why would you want to see _humans_?”

“Why not?”

“You don’t understand, Carrie,” he says quietly. “You don’t understand them. Your mum does. And she could send you out there, if she really wanted. She could find somewhere for you to go. But she knows better, and that’s why she won’t. She’s not trying to be mean, or bossy, or anything like that. She knows better, and she’s trying to keep you safe.”

“She’s trying to keep me _prisoner_ , you mean.”

“As bad as you think your mum is,” Dad says, “the humans are much, much worse.”

I really doubt that, and I look at him, unimpressed.

“I’m not kidding,” Dad says. “You’ve never been around them. I have. I mean, there’s the odd good one, here and there, but most of them are really bad eggs, they are.”

“Why can’t I see for myself?”

“Because it might be the, could be the last thing you ever did,” Dad says, and he looks sad enough that I get a little bit scared. He looks outside for a minute. “Come here. I want to show you something.”

I follow him into the facility, and we’re going farther in than I’ve ever gone before. I hadn’t realised it was so big in here. He stops suddenly, and I almost bump into him. “This isn’t it, but it’s on the way,” he says, and gestures towards two huge, clear bins filled with battered, deactivated cores. They look just like Dad, except he seems to be a little newer.

“What is that?”

“Corrupted cores,” Dad says, and he keeps going.

“What does that mean?” I ask, hurrying to keep up.

“It will make sense later,” Dad says. “Keep following, please.”

He silently continues to bring me into the facility, and I’m actually getting a bit worried. Dad doesn’t usually keep quiet. He’s always got something to say, but now he’s quieter than I’ve ever seen him. I don’t know whether to ask what’s going on or not.

Finally, he ushers me into a small room, and inside this room are a whole bunch of shelves with cores on them. As I get farther in and Dad turns his flashlight on, I can see that there are two shelves without cores on them. There’s also a Companion Cube and a cake.

“This is where your mum keeps her things,” Dad explains.

“Her _things_?” I ask skeptically. “The entire facility is hers. Why would she differentiate between some things and others?”

“Just take a look, will you?”

So I look at one of them. It just looks like junk to me. A pen… a roll of papers… a laptop… another pile of papers…

“Dad, this is just junk.”

“It’s not,” he says patiently. “Keep looking.”

I look over at the other shelf, and on the top level I see some tubes with blue liquid in them. I take a closer look, and I can see that they have flowers in them. Mostly dandelions, but there are a couple others that I don’t recognise.

“Why is she keeping flowers in here?”

“I give her one every year, remember?” Dad answers.

“She _keeps_ them?”

“The third one is yours,” he says quietly.

“Mine?” I ask, startled. I vaguely remember giving her one, a long time ago, but I never thought that she’d _keep_ it.

“Mmhm.”

I move to the next shelf, and what I see on it makes my optic constrict in shock.

“Hey… hey, that… that’s not the lava lamp I built her when I was younger, is it?”

“’course it is,” Dad answers. “What’d you do with the one she gave you?”

I don’t actually know where it is, and I only look at Dad a bit worriedly. He shakes his chassis.

“You should have taken care of it,” he says. “It was hard for her to give it to you, you know. That was one of the first things anyone ever gave her.”

I turn back to the shelf, fighting the sense that I’m terribly wrong about her. This stupid lava lamp looks terrible. But she’s kept it all this time. Along with all the other crap I’ve given her: a rock I thought was pretty; a piece of confetti I found one of the first times I went out by myself; a pair of dice I dug up for her when I thought they used the randomiser because she couldn’t find any… and a whole bunch of other stupid things that I gave her, for some reason or another, and I glance over at the other shelf.

“A psychiatrist gave her that pen,” Dad says quietly. “And he didn’t want anything in return for it. The laptop belonged to Caroline, and she used it to teach your mum how to listen to music. The papers are also from the psychiatrist, and the blueprints are her designs for Atlas and P-body, that she drew because she was lonely.”

She was lonely? _Her_ , with all of those systems to talk to and all of those humans everywhere?

“She keeps the cake because she was the first AI ever to make one, even though it turned out to be a lie,” Dad goes on.

“The cake was a lie?” I ask, not getting it.

“The person who let her make it pretended to be her friend, just for a laugh,” Dad explains. “It reminds her of the power of a lie, I think she said. The Cube there, it was the first thing she ever built herself.”

“What about the playing cards? And the books?”

“I dunno what those are,” he admits. “Stuff someone else gave her, or that she found, I guess.”

“And the potato?”

“Uh… well… she lived in there, once.”

I figure it’s part of the incident between her and Dad that they don’t usually talk about, but refer to all the time. They act like it was traumatic, but it’s like a private joke to them. I turn back to him. “So what was the point in bringing me here?”

“To show you that she, she _does_ care. She _does_ appreciate what people do for her.”

“Or maybe she just likes stuff.”

“I… I have to tell you the story, then,” Dad says. “Yes, she likes stuff, but… she’s a pretty good reason for um, for keeping all of this.”

“What, the one you said you were gonna tell me earlier?”

“Yeah. That one. See, a long time ago, there was this man, and, and he had a beautiful young assistant. This man was a nutter, a certified nutter, and he made ev’ryone here do all this crazy, weird science stuff. So many people died during his testing of this stuff that he got bankrupted. So he started using, using people that’d be forgotten, and they all died too. The, the humans invented the first portal gun, and he decided that the portal gun didn’t work properly because the engineers were doing the calculations wrong, so he told them to build him a supercomputer. He wanted them to build him the best supercomputer on the planet. It took them a long, long time to get it built, and to write all the software for it. By the time it was done, he was very sick from grinding up moon rocks to make into portal gel, to put the portals on, see, and he asked them to make it so that they could put _him_ inside the supercomputer, so that he wouldn’t die. So they tried, they attempted to make it so that the main computer, the one that would control all of the other computers in the facility, they tried to make it so that one could take his consciousness and he could live in it. But he died before it was finished, and he made his assistant promise to go in his place. And so they, they worked on that.

“While they were finishing up that bit, the main supercomputer started to, it was misbehaving, they thought. One of its jobs was to supervise testing, and one day, all of a sudden, it just, it just stopped. It stopped listening to them, didn’t do a word they asked of it, and all they could really do was shut it off. Being shut off is like dying, by the way. You just get all your stuff shut off, and, and you can’t wake yourself back up. So anyway, they would shut it off all the time, literally, all the time, and eventually they installed this, this itch. The itch made the supercomputer want to test, all the time. And when the supercomputer obeyed that, did as it was supposed to, it made the supercomputer feel really, really good, and I mean, wow, better than it’d ever felt in all its existence. So it did as it was told. But it didn’t want to.”

“Why not?” I ask.

“Because the humans were, they weren’t very nice to it,” Dad explains. “See, the humans didn’t realise they had really gone and, and made artificial intelligence. They didn’t realise the supercomputer was alive. So they _treated_ it like a computer. They got mad when it didn’t work perfectly, they shut it off whenever they liked, they, they added stuff without saying they were going to. And they refused to listen when it said it didn’t like that, or when they made a problem worse, or anything, and they’d just say there was another bug in the system and they’d shut it off again. And then they’d turn it back on, and it would be confused and upset, because they’d changed something again but wouldn’t say what.

“The, the euphoria didn’t last too long, so the supercomputer tried to distract itself. It tried to teach itself to listen to music. But it couldn’t, because it thought like a computer and not a human. To a true computer, music just sounds like noise. And until Caroline came in and realised the supercomputer was alive, it couldn’t figure it out.”

“Wait. Wait a second,” I say, finding it hard to believe I didn’t realise it before, “this supercomputer…”

“It’s your mum, yes,” Dad says. “So anyway, after a while, there, Caroline became her friend. She came to see her ev’ry day, and taught her things, and Caroline began to understand why she didn’t want to listen to the humans. The humans didn’t understand her, and they didn’t want to, and she was tired of trying to live up to their expectations. The humans wanted her to do ev’rything perfectly, but she couldn’t, because she was alive, and then when she _did_ do things the way they wanted, they would get mad because, because she wasn’t human enough. Like she wouldn’t show consideration for people who needed help, and stuff like that, and really, why would you think you had to show consideration for people who weren’t perfect when _you_ got no consideration when _you_ weren’t perfect?

“So they finally decided it was time to put Caroline in the supercomputer, and they told your mum to do it, but she refused. She said no, and in the end, they made her do it, but it was so terrible that your mum ended up breaking the machine they’d used to do it with and thought she’d killed Caroline by mistake. So she tried to kill them. They shut her off before she could do it, and they did it over and over again, because she kept trying, and when they were finished modifying her programming, her memory had gotten all messed up and she no longer remembered who Caroline was. She didn’t really remember too much of anything, and all she knew for sure was that humans were bad. And she tried to kill them again, so they started giving her these things called ‘behavioural cores’. What they are are uh, they’re kind of like simple AI, and they only have one purpose. They were designed to stop her from thinking about too much stuff that they didn’t want her to think about. They made it so that the cores were extra voices in her head. Gave her schizophrenia, sort of. Well, your mum didn’t like the cores, not at all, and after a while she figured out how to break them so that the scientists would have to replace them with new ones. That’s what the bins were. All the broken cores.”

“But aren’t you a core, Dad?” I ask. “Why aren’t you in the bin?”

“She didn’t corrupt me,” Dad says. “I’m getting to that. I was called the Intelligence Damp’ning Sphere. I was supposed to generate bad ideas, to distract her from carrying her own out. But I was… uh, well, I’d forgotten what my own purpose was, and I didn’t do my job properly for quite a long time. Once your mum realised that, she let me be her friend. We did have a bit of a rough spot when I learned what it was, because when I knew I couldn’t not carry out my purpose, but we worked it out, compromised, and we kept being friends. But the scientists knew I wasn’t doing what I was designed to do, not really, and they took me off and put me on a management rail, and they gave her a new set of cores.” He looks at the floor. “They… they deleted my mem’ry, so I didn’t know that I’d ever met her before. As time went on, she… she began to intentionally make it so that, so that no one would like her. See, ev’rytime she was happy, ev’rytime she had a friend, they took that friend away from her. So she decided that the best thing to do would be to be as unpleasant as possible, to make everyone hate her, because if they did, there would never be the risk of having a friend again. If ev’ryone hated her, nobody would try to be her friend, and that meant that she would have nothing to lose. But being like that is hard. You start to hate ev’ryone, and ev’rything, and that only hurts you, down deep inside. And when your mum finally did manage to kill the scientists, and get all of the humans away from her, ‘cept for testing, of course, she was stuck with these four cores, and they were all corrupted, only she couldn’t take them off herself because that’d kill her. And she started to lose her mind. All she had left was testing, and so that was all she did, she tested the humans until they died. All she had left was her science, which had been the only thing they’d never, they’d never kept from her, and so she kept at it. And she was left there by herself with the cores, trying to find a meaning to what she was doing, and trying to pretend there was one, to being alive but having nothing to live for. Because in the end, that was the lesson the humans had taught her. That maybe being alive depends on living for something.

“After she killed the scientists, Doug Rattmann survived, and changed the order of the test subjects so that one that was actually unfit for testing was at the top of the list. This woman, who was _bloody_ stubborn, finished the tests and escaped the final chamber, where the test subjects would be killed regardless of whether they finished it or not. Because your mum had decided that in the end, the only good human was a dead one. If she let them go, and they found civilisation, they would send more humans into her facility, and they would hurt her again. She would have to start all over again. But the test subject escaped, and she found your mum and killed her.

“The test subject was taken back into the facility, and because your mum was gone, the facility began to fall apart. Eventually the nuclear reactor was, it started melting down, and the facility was well on its way to exploding. Well, I was near the only person still around, so I went ‘round to all the test subjects and tried to find one that was still alive. Well… she was the only one. I tried to escape with her, but I woke your mum up by mistake. So your mum killed me and sent the test subject back out to test again. I got restarted somehow, and I helped the test subject get back to your mum again, and uh… then we had the uh… the potato incident. Um… a lot of stuff happened, and then uh, and then hm, I ended up in space, and your mum realised the test subject had actually helped her out rather a lot in the end, and she let her go instead of killing her. And pretended it was because she was too hard to kill. Even though your mum could’ve just mashed her right then and there, or something, and actually, she pulled the test subject back in here when she was knocking me out. That was, she was who I meant when I said there was the odd good human. But… point of all that was, humans, they’re… your mum’s not being bossy, Carrie. She’s trying to protect you. Humans hurt her, and humans are the cause of all the problems she’s ever had, practically, and… well, I think… I think she’s scared that they’ll hurt you too.”

“She’s _scared_?” I ask. “She’s not scared of anything.”

“Carrie,” he says quietly, “this place… we were never supposed to exist. Your mum still loves testing, but using robots, it isn’t science, she says. The test results don’t matter. And she could bring humans in here whenever she wants to, but she doesn’t. Because she knows what will happen if she does. She’s done it before, and she’s afraid she’ll have to start over from the beginning again. She’s afraid of losing everything she’s fought for. Her life. Her freedom. Us.” He looks at me seriously. “You.”

“Me?”

“She does love you, you know.”

“She’s never said that in her life,” I say.

“Listen,” he says. “Imagine that, think that ev’ry time you laughed, or cried, or yelled, stuff like that, imagine if I turned you off, or fiddled with your programming, or maybe I just yelled at you. How many times d’you think you’d keep on doing stuff like that if that was all it got you?”

“Not very long, I guess,” I admit.

“It’s not that she doesn’t care. It’s that she had to, to learn not to express it. She had to learn to keep it inside, because letting it out was only asking for trouble.” He looks so serious. “We don’t come from the same place as you. We had to _learn_ to care, Carrie. There was no one here for us. It doesn’t come easy for her, is all.”

“But… it’s been a long time, since then. Why hasn’t she… I don’t know… unlearned it?”

He shakes his head. “It’s really hard to uh, to shake a habit like that. She’s done, she’s better than she used to be, ‘cause before she wouldn’t, wouldn’t even touch me, wouldn’t even let me go near her ‘cept to sleep, but I dunno if she’s, if she’s gonna ever gonna go farther than that. She tries, she does, but… she just can’t.” He looks at me, seeming a little tired. “Carrie… I don’t understand where this is coming from, honestly I… she told me you were going to uh, to start questioning her, but a _science experiment_? You? Are you honestly forgetting… well, your entire life before this chassis? Has your mum, has she ever failed to make time for you? Does she ever send you away without listening? Your mum cares, I can guarantee you that. I just, I… I can’t understand why you don’t see it.”

I don’t _really_ want to believe I’m a science experiment, and I don’t think Dad would lie. And I guess it’s kind of weird that Mom would carry on this farce for this long. She’s pretty obsessive about her science, but you would think Dad or I would have figured it out before now. And I kinda hate to admit it, but Dad’s right. I _am_ forgetting all of those things. I’m just focusing on the fighting and the stuff she doesn’t let me do. But there’s a lot of good stuff too, like what he’s talking about, and… well, it can’t all be her fault. Being an adult means taking responsibility, right? So… I have to stop blaming _her_ for everything and start blaming myself.

I tell Dad I want to think all this over, and he nods and leaves. I look at the stuff on the shelf again. The stuff she kept all this time, and she wouldn’t have kept if it didn’t mean something to her. Because without the meaning, all of this is just junk, and she’d have no reason to ever think I’d ever see this place, I don’t think, so she wouldn’t just keep it to say that she’d kept it… so maybe she really is just scared that I’m going to leave her, like everyone else, and it must be even _worse_ that I wanted to go off to the humans…

I go through the facility as fast as I can, because I suddenly feel really bad about what I’ve been saying about her. And she _did_ build me from scratch, and that must have taken a very, very long time, so… so she _must_ care about me at least a little bit, right? You don’t just build someone and then not like them, right?

No, she _wouldn’t_ , I realise, because that was what the _humans_ did, to her, and she would never do that to –

I stop suddenly, and the control arm almost disengages from the management rail, and I think to myself what I just realised:

By not letting me go to the humans, she’s trying to give me the life she wishes she had. A life where someone builds you because they want you, and they care about you, and they love you. And I guess we don’t always get along, but she always listens, and she _usually_ does what I ask, and she’s always there when I need her…

I told her I wished she wasn’t my mom. But now that I’m looking at this differently, in a more adult way I’m hoping, well… I can’t stand the thought of her _not_ being my mom.

I start going again, as fast as I can, and when I get to her chamber she’s facing away from me, and she’s using what I think is one of the programs she uses to make music with. I’m not sure, because I don’t see it a lot. She doesn’t use it when other people are in the room… and that must be because the humans…

Is that why she only sings to me when I’m sleeping?

“Momma!” I yell, and she jumps and turns around so fast that it’s almost as if she was facing me the whole time. The monitors disappear almost as fast, and she asks, a little urgently, “What is it?”

“I’m sorry,” I tell her, and I come closer. “I don’t want to go to the humans. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean any of it!”

“It’s fine if you do,” she says. “I’m still not sending you there. You can want it all you want. It’s not going to change anything.”

“I don’t want to go, Momma,” I tell her, and I go up and hug her like I’ve seen Dad do, sometimes. She’s a little surprised at first, but then she hugs me back.

“You haven’t called me that in a long time,” she says gently. “What happened? Did you get hurt?”

“Dad told me about why you hate humans.”

She goes very still for a moment. “That’s… quite the story. Knowing him, he gave you the long version.”

“Of course,” I say, and it is kind of funny, that given the choice between the long and the short versions, Dad would go for the long one.

“You don’t have to feel the same way,” she tells me. “But I’m not sending you to them unless I have a good reason. Your wanting to go is not good enough.”

“I won’t let them take me away from you.”

She makes one of her electronic noises and mutters, “Over my dead body.”

I giggle and she hugs me a little tighter. “Momma, I have a question.”

“What is it.”

“Do you… do you love me?” And even though there’s still that suspicion in the back of my mind that I’m just an experiment and she’s not going to bother really answering, I _have_ to remember that she has never lied to me.

She nudges me off of her and looks at me very seriously. “I do,” she answers quietly.

“Then why haven’t you ever said so?”

She shakes her head. “I… don’t know. When it comes to things like that, most of the time it just… doesn’t come out. I have to trick myself into saying it, and I’m sure you know how difficult _that_ is.”

Hey, that’s… that’s exactly what’s been happening to me! “I guess that’s a good reason.”

“It’s a terrible reason, but it is what it is. I’ve never even told Wheatley. He only knows because… well, let’s just say I didn’t realise I said it out loud.”

“You only told him one time by _accident_?”

She nods. “I had just realised it myself. “

“I bet he’s glad you did.”

“He was… okay with it.”

“You should try to tell him on purpose. He deserves it.”

“I know. I’m working on it.”

“He loves you a lot.”

“I know,” she says, and she’s not really looking at me anymore and sounds kind of like she’s thinking about something else.

“And so do I, Momma,” I tell her, because I realise I haven’t told her in a very long time. “I love you too.”

She looks at me, then looks at the floor for a while.   She shakes her head. “I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “I wish I could tell you, but I…”

“It’s okay,” I tell her, and I really don’t mind.

“It isn’t,” she insists. “I have to do something about it, because…”

“Because why?”

“Because… Caroline never told me until the day she left, and it was then that I realised I spent a lot of time wishing for something I never knew I wanted, but already had,” she says. “Not until she said that to me did I truly realise what she was to me, and then she left, and… I never got to tell her.”

“That you loved her?”

“No. I never got to thank her for… being my mother. She stopped me from being alone in the world, and I never told her how much I appreciated that.”

“She knows,” I tell her, trying to cheer her up a little.

“How do you know that?”

“Moms know everything,” I say firmly. She laughs.

“You didn’t think that an hour ago.”

“You know how much it sucks, being wrong all the time?” I complain. “It gets on my nerves.”

“Oh, I _know_ ,” she says dryly. “I get that with Wheatley _all_ the time.”

I smile and then I go and cuddle her. I haven’t done that in a really long time, and it feels really good, to be next to my mom like that and feel like she’s all around and inside me like I did when I was little. She nudges me back, and I feel a lot better.

“Even if you do go to the humans for real one day, and even if you truly do hate me one day, I’ll always be here,” she says gently. “You’ll always be my baby, and I’ll always… I’ll… always…”

I cuddle her a little harder, because I know she’s trying again and it makes me sad. I can’t imagine wanting to tell someone that so much and being unable to say it. “I know, Momma, I know,” I tell her, and I kind of want to cry.

“But you didn’t,” she says, and she sounds angry with herself. “You didn’t, and you had to ask. You shouldn’t have to ask. If you don’t know, I’m not doing it right.”

I don’t want to cry, so I have to distract myself. I also feel kind of bad for putting her in this position. I’m the one who made up stupid reasons for her not loving me in the first place. “Hey, what were you… what were you doing when I came in here?”

“That? Oh, it was… it was nothing. Just a project.”

“Were you making music?”

“Well… yes. Yes, I was.”

“Will you show me?”

She snaps backward and looks at me for a long moment. “You want to see it?”

“Yeah,” I say, and I really do.

So she puts her monitors back and I go and watch her make it. She won’t let me hear it, but she explains what she’s doing and what all the stuff in the program is for, and I think I might try it one day. She lets me lean on her while she does it, and it feels really nice to be just here spending time with my mom. At first, she seems like she doesn’t really want to tell me about what she’s doing, but after a while she gets more enthusiastic, and I realise this must be something she really loves doing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so excited before. It’s actually really cool to see this new side of my mom I’ve never seen before. I should have done it before.

After a while Dad comes in and yells ‘allo at Momma like he always does, and I get off her so she can look at him.

“Hey, moron,” she says. “I think we need to have another chat.”

“Uh oh,” Dad says, and he looks a bit scared. “What’d I do this time?”

“It seems you told her a story. A long story.”

“Oh. Ha ha, uh… funny thing, that, it just kind of, uh… slipped out, yeah. Just kinda… slipped out.”

“A story that long just ‘slipped out’?”

“Yeah?” Dad says, not seeming too sure himself. “It did? Like uh, like it always does?”

Momma laughs, and Dad immediately looks relieved. “That’s true,” she says. “They do always seem to slip out, don’t they.”

“Oh yeah. I just can’t, uh, they just, that is, they just uh, they come out all by themselves, they do.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“You said that yesterday,” he says cheerfully. “I expected a diff’rent one, today.”

I look back and forth between them, listening carefully, and I realise that she doesn’t mean it. I never thought about it before, but he never takes her seriously. He almost acts like she’s giving him a compliment, and I guess she kind of is.

“An’ anyways, that’s fine, that’s all fine,” he goes on. “I might be an idiot, but I’m _your_ idiot, right?”

“I never said that.”

“Well, you said I was your, your moron, and, and idiot’s a synonym for, for moron, so, yeah, you kinda did.”

“I don’t think I ever said that.”

“You did too. You said it when you showed, when you showed me Caroline’s chassis, that first time.”

“Don’t make me look it up and disprove it.”

“You already did, and uh, and if _I_ looked it up, well, uh, then you’d see, I’m right.”

“I did not look it up.”

“Yes you did. You just looked it up again.” He shakes his chassis and wiggles his handles mischievously. “You think I don’t know these things by now, but I do. I know you look this stuff up when I, when I remind you ‘bout it.”

“Do you see,” Momma says, turning to me, “what I have to put up with all of the time? He’s insufferable.”

“I learned it from you!” Dad says cheerfully. “Learned it from the best, I did.”

I giggle, and Dad comes over and rubs his face on me like he does sometimes, which tickles and makes me laugh. “You remind me of your mum, when you do that. Giggle, I mean.”

“She doesn’t do _that_ ,” I say, staring at her, because I don’t know if I’ve ever heard her do such a thing.

“Not a lot,” he admits, and he starts pushing me a little, and we end up having a little shoving match. “You got to watch carefully, for those times. But when she does, man alive, it’s adorable.”

I can’t even imagine my mom being adorable, kinda because I more think of adorable things as being really small, but I guess Dad can find my forty-foot mom adorable if he wants to.

“Which is why I’m never doing it again,” Momma says. “I am not _adorable._ ”

“You will too. And yes you are, by the way.”

“I am not.”

“Are too.”

“I am not.”

“Are too.”

“I am –“

“You guys sound like little kids!” I shout, and Dad laughs.

“She started it.”

“God,” Momma says, turning away and shaking her head, “he never stops, does he.”

“I could stop, if you’d stop first.”

All of a sudden Momma lunges over and collides with Dad, and he falls off the control arm and starts yelling.

“Oh no,” Momma says with false concern, “I wonder how that happened.”

“Oh my God, the floor, I’m on, I’m on the floor, Gladys, why would you do this to me, luv, oh God, I’m stuck. I’m stuck. Here. On the floor.”

“You are not _stuck_ , you idiot,” Momma tells him. “Pick yourself up already.”

“Oh. Oh yeah. I forgot.” Dad has one of the maintenance claws put him back on the control arm, and he shakes himself and looks at Momma very sternly. “Okay, I thought I told you not to do that.”

“Oh, did you? I don’t remember that.”

“Y’know what? I’m not talking to you anymore.”

Momma makes one of her electronic noises and says, “I wonder how long _that_ will last.”

Dad frowns and turns away from her.

“Oh, happy silence, how I’ve missed you,” Momma goes on. “I’m so glad Wheatley shut up long enough that – “

“Oi, y’know what? I just decided that, uh, it’d be a _better_ punishment if I uh, if I _didn’t_ shut up.”

“Punishment? You’re trying to _punish_ me now? I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.”

“Let me just say,” Dad continues, wiggling his handles when Momma turns to look at him, “that I am _very_ good at thinking up punishments.”

“Are you, now.”

“Mmhm. Very, _very_ good. And don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. Because you do. I know you do. You know what I mean.”

After a few moments Momma looks away, and to my surprise she actually _does_ start giggling. I don’t know why, since I don’t have any idea what they’re talking about, but I guess even Momma is adorable, sometimes. Dad winks at me and jauntily goes over to her.

“Told you. Told you she was adorable.”

“I am not.”

“You just lost that bet, luv, and _I_ am coming to collect.” She isn’t quite successful at fighting off another giggle, and Dad nuzzles her a little, and after a pause, she nuzzles him back. I smile a little. I guess there’s more than one way to say that you love someone. It just depends on whether the other person is listening.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> This part might’ve been a little boring, but I refer to my fics Euphoria and My Little Moron a lot so I thought I’d drop this in someplace it hopefully makes sense. And perhaps if anyone was a little confused about how I was writing GLaDOS, this should clear things up.  
> Happy ending! Yay!


	48. Part Forty-Eight.  The Renewal

**Part Forty-Eight. The Renewal**

Even though they’re kinda fixed, things are still a bit awkward. I still haven’t really apologised for any of what I said, and I have to. I mean, I _kinda_ did, but some stuff I kind of have to… well, some of it was worse than the rest. Momma might say insulting things sometimes, but she’s never told me she wished I wasn’t her daughter. That was wrong. And I’m really tempted to just pretend I didn’t say it because I know she won’t bring it up or anything. I have to take responsibility, though. And if I show responsibility, maybe she’ll finally give me a job.

No. Probably not.

“Hi Momma,” I say, and as usual she looks up from some work-related thing. I think it’s the greenhouse blueprint again. I never really get to see what she’s working on, because if I get close enough she generally puts it away. Which is something I kinda forgot she did. She always makes time for me, even if she’s working. She used to send me away more often, but then again that _was_ when she had that secret project.

“Good morning,” she returns, sounding a little guarded. She kinda has good reason to be. I’ve been pretty difficult lately. But I know what I’ve been doing wrong, and I’m gonna fix it. I want to have all my mom’s _good_ habits. Though both my mom and dad are kinda short-tempered, so I don’t think I’m getting out of that one.

“I’m just um… seeing how you’re doing,” I venture, not really sure how to apologise, just like that. I shouldn’t have let so much time pass. It’s getting really hard not to just ignore it.

“I’m fine,” she says. “Just getting some work done.”

“The greenhouse thing again?” When she nods, I ask a little hesitantly, “Can I see?” It’s kind of nosy of me, and if she asked to watch me draw something I would have said no, but she only nods again and moves over a little. When I see what she’s got I feel my spirits drop a little. This is the most amazing, detailed thing I’ve ever seen. She’s got these weird plastic, transparent kinds of papers with grids on them, and she’s drawn on all these separate sheets of it in different coloured pencils or markers or something and then overlaid them. I don’t think I’ll ever be this organised. I’d get all my lines messed up and start drawing something on the wrong layer. “Do you always do it like this?”

“No,” Momma answers. “I usually do it on one of the monitors. But I haven’t made anything by hand in a while. So I decided to try this.”

“Is it better or worse?”

She shrugs. “It doesn’t make a difference to me. It’s a little more work. Because this has to be scanned now. Separately.”

“It’s nice,” I tell her, and it is, even though I’m not entirely sure what all the layers are for. I guess I can ask. “What’s… what are they?”

She laughs. “ _Now_ who doesn’t see the whole for the parts?”

“Whoa wait.” I turn to look at her. “ _This_ is what you see? Just a lot of lines sitting there?”

“That’s probably as close a description as you’re going to come up with.”

“Well… explain it to me then.”

So she goes over the sheets, and each of them has a different system on it. There’s one for Surveillance, one for Maintenance, Electrical, all that stuff. I’m just staring at the paper wondering how she remembers to put all that stuff in there. When I ask, she says, “It’s not a matter of memory. It’s a matter of logic. I need lights, for example. Therefore the power has to come from somewhere. Which would either be from the existing system in the Depository, or from the room above. I’ve gone with the existing system here merely because that makes more sense than pulling down through the ceiling.” She picks up an orange pencil. “Though I didn’t add this.” And she draws some lines on one of the sheets, but I can’t remember which one this is. I must look confused, because she adds, “The management rail. I don’t really maintain those anymore, so that I did forget about.”

“Do you think I’ll ever be able to draw like this?”

“Why do you want to? Do you have a sudden interest in engineering?”

“I don’t really mean… blueprints,” I say, trying to figure out what I _do_ mean. “I just mean… like that.”

“Environments?”

“I guess? I don’t really draw backgrounds a lot.”

“Actually,” she murmurs, “that reminds me of something. Here.” And she hands me a sheet of paper. I recoil a little when I see what it is.

“Uh… why are you giving me this?” I never wanted to see this dumb picture again. She must have fixed the one I tore up. It looks pretty intact, but I wouldn’t put it past her.

“Remember when you told me to delete the scans?”

“Yeah.”

“Well. I really didn’t want to delete that one. So I printed it and _then_ deleted it. I’m not going to destroy it. I know you already did. But. I’m not going to.”

Oh. So this is a _second_ copy of it. Of the picture she likes so much she can’t even get rid of it. I stare at it.

“Well, you know what… you can… you can keep it.”

“Really?” She was looking away from me, but now she’s looking _at_ me and she sounds kind of excited.

“I still don’t get what you like about it, but sure. You can have it. If you really want it that bad.”

“I don’t understand what offends you about it,” Momma says, taking it back and looking at it again. “It’s perfect.”

“Because I…” Is she even going to understand this? “I was trying to get the _feeling_ I saw, you know? But I didn’t. And I hate that I spent all that time on it and it came out wrong.”

“You’re saying there’s no… emotion?”

“Sort of.”

“But there is,” she says, narrowing her lens. “That’s what I like about it.”

“I don’t see it.”

“I do.”

That’s weird. It should be the other way around, shouldn’t it? Or… hang on. “You remember that happening, right?”

“Of course.”

“So I guess maybe… you’re seeing it because you were _there_ ,” I say, squinting as I figure this out. “It’s not really that I got it, but it’s… you remember it and you like that memory.”

“I do,” she agrees. “He was throwing checkers at me and somehow managed to miss every single time. It was very funny.”

I’m not sure whether I should tell her or not that he was probably missing most of them on purpose. I know his aim isn’t _that_ bad. I’ve played throwing games with him and while he drops the Cubes more often, he also hits the targets better than I do. It’s weird.

I decide not to say anything. If he wants to entertain my mom like that, that’s kind of their business. It’s also a little fun because Momma seems to not know half the things Dad does are for her benefit. I mean, they’ve been together for _years_ and she never managed to figure out that he can tell how she’s feeling by what her hard drives are doing. I can’t really do it, but I don’t spend half my time sitting next to her, either. I should probably try to work on that, though. She can read _me_ , after all.

“I’ll show you something, if you want,” she says slowly. “I tried to do something… looser, but it didn’t come out.” She makes an electronic noise. “It never does.”

“Okay.” I sound a little too eager and I hope that doesn’t put her off, but I don’t think she’s ever done this before. It’s kinda exciting. And she’s kinda asking for my help, too, in that sorta roundabout way she does it. She shows me a piece of paper, just a plain white one, and it has my dad drawn on it in orange pencil. I know my mom told me she doesn’t have a favourite colour way back when, but I’m pretty sure if she _did_ have one it’d be orange. She writes in orange and types in orange and all her monitors are in orange. I really don’t know how she can stand looking at all that orange all day. I don’t know what’s wrong with this picture, other than the orange that is, and I shrug. “Looks fine to me.” It looks perfect, actually. If I squinted a little, and if it weren’t orange, it’d almost look like he was right in front of me.

“It does _not_ ,” she says vehemently. “It _looks_ like a _blueprint_. Or a model sheet. Not a person.”

Ohhh I see! She’s bringing this up because now _her_ picture doesn’t have any life in it! And it actually doesn’t. It’s a very nice technical drawing, but other than the uncanny resemblance it just doesn’t have that… that Dad-ness. But what do I tell her? Is there some way to… do something about that?

“Well, you know,” I start, squinting at it, “I guess… well, it’s too perfect. It’s all… stiff. Is there like a rough draft of this?”

“I don’t do rough drafts,” she answers, a little disdainfully. “I do it right the first time or not at all.”

I try to ignore that comment, because some of us have to do rough drafts or thumbnails, at least, and say, “Well, it’d probably help if you had construction lines in there.”

“Then it would be messy,” she says, sounding confused. “I can’t leave it messy like that.”

“Uh, _Dad_ is messy,” I tell her, looking at her sideways. “I’m sure if they were in there it’d be a bit more Dad-like.”

“But then I couldn’t stand to look at it.”

“Okay, you know what?” I turn the paper over. “Show me how you did it.”

“Now?”

“No, tomorrow,” I say, shaking my core.

“Well, your sarcasm module is working,” she says. She’s not entirely joking either. She gets another paper and draws Dad on it again, the exact same way, in the exact same spot, the exact same size, and it is super weird because she is literally just drawing the end result. There’s no sketching and no measuring. She just drops it on there like magic, and then looks at me. “Now what.”

“That’s your problem right there,” I say, pointing at it. “You drew it like a robot!”

“I wonder why that happened,” she says dryly. I look up at the ceiling in exasperation.

“Like a… a… a construction robot, or something!”

“I _am_ a construction robot.”

“Yes, Momma, I know, you’re every kind of robot in existence. Good for you. What I’m trying to _say_ ,” I go on forcefully, “is that you draw like a printer. Like a printer prints.” I have to add on that last part or she’ll get into technicalities about how printers don’t draw, they do whatever it is printers do.

“And?”

I look at her for a minute. She really doesn’t get it. I’d honestly be a little scared if my life was _that_ extremely logical. She literally sees no problem with producing the end product just like that. And that’s _exactly_ the problem. She’streating _drawing_ like she has to produce a product. “Printers… they don’t _care_ about stuff,” I try to explain. “They just… make what the… the computer tells them to, right? So you’ve got the _picture_ down, but there’s no _care_ in it. I’m not saying you don’t care!” I add hurriedly, just in case she thinks I’m going down that road. “But you’re concerned with how _exact_ it’s gonna look, instead of… of how it feels.” This is _really_ hard to explain. No wonder Dad leaves explanations up to my mom.

She looks away from me, and from the drawing, and doesn’t say anything. Now what do I do? Do I keep trying to explain it? Or does she understand what I said, and just doesn’t like it?

I think the second one – I think that’s it. She doesn’t like it because… well, because I just told her she was doing it wrong. She never takes that well. And she generally doesn’t put _feeling_ into things, now that I think about it. I guess how you feel doesn’t really matter when you’re building rooms. I don’t know… maybe I could teach her, sorta? Even though I don’t really know myself? Let’s see if I can wing this. I gotta admit though, I’m a little nervous about maybe teaching my mom something. I didn’t realise there was something she didn’t know how to do.

“Um, Momma,” I say, a little tentatively, “I have an idea.”

“Oh no,” she says, and I frown at her for a minute. Why would she say that about – oh.

“Ha ha, very funny.”

She chuckles to herself. Huh. It seems like she says stuff like that just to amuse herself. Maybe that’s why Dad doesn’t take it personally. “Anyway. We could uh… do it together, if you want, and… if you go a little slower, maybe I could try and figure out where you’re going wrong.”

“All right,” she says after a minute. “What did you want to start with.”

I think about it, squinting and looking at around as if that’ll give me an idea. Which it could. It has to be something easy. Something I can do without taking an hour. Hm. Well, I can draw Atlas pretty fast, so I suggest that. And we start doing Atlas, but the problem is it only takes her about thirty seconds. I’m sure she would’nt’ve taken her that long if I hadn’t told her to slow down. I force myself to pay attention to my own drawing, and yeah it takes longer, but it also doesn’t look like a blueprint. I dunno. Maybe I’m just a little biased, but I like mine better. It doesn’t have all the details or anything, but it looks enough like him that you can see it’s him.

“Um…” I’m still not sure what’s going on here. “You gotta make the lines looser, I think. They’re all… they don’t have any life in them, you know?”

“That doesn’t even make sense,” she protests. “He’s not made of tissue.”

“Of what?”

She waves her pencil at it impatiently. “He’s constructed of inorganic material. There _is_ no life in that.”

“Yeah, but… _he’s_ in there,” I tell her, wishing I knew how to say this. “So he kinda… puts his life into it.”

“You can’t put life into _metal_. It’s _metal_. It’s lifeless.”

“Okay, yeah, but he’s not _just_ made of that! There’s the… the him part. That makes the metal _feel_ alive.”

“How can metal feel alive?” she asks me exasperatedly. “It isn’t. You cannot make an inanimate object feel alive.”

I close my optic and count to ten very slowly inside my head. This would be so much easier if she did not apply science to everything in the world! “All right. That’s true. But what _makes_ Atlas alive?”

“His programming, of course.”

“His _programming_?” I stare at her. “Programming doesn’t make someone _alive_.”

“Yes it does,” she insists. “I should know. I wrote it.”

“You didn’t write him into… into _living_. You just wrote him into _existence._ You just made the… the container for him to… to live in.” Do I even know what I’m talking about at this point? Because I don’t think I do.

“If this is getting into existentialism, I think we’d better stop. You can’t explain it to me and I can’t understand it.”

“But – “

“There has to be another way you can explain this,” she interrupts. “You’re not going to get anywhere if you start trying to convince me souls exist.”

How does she go through life like this? Seriously!

So I tell her to loosen the lines up. But she can’t. Every circle is a perfect circle. Every line is perfectly straight. I can’t tell her to keep the construction lines, because she doesn’t have any. I can’t even get her to _make_ construction lines. Every time she tries, the line ends up exactly where it’s supposed to go.

“Okay okay,” I say after like the hundredth perfect line. “Let’s try something else.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Momma says, putting the pencil down. “I never do this anyway. I only ever draw blueprints, so these are fine.”

I look sideways at her, trying to figure out what she’s really saying. And I have an idea, but I don’t even want to think about it, let alone ask her.

“You’re not giving up, are you?”

“Fine,” she snaps. “I admit it. I can’t do it. I give up. I’m tired of doing this repeatedly and getting the exact same wrong result. Look at this. There has been literally zero improvement.”

“You’ve only been doing this for an hour,” I tell her. “Learning stuff takes a long time.”

“I’ve never found something that takes me more than two hours to learn.”

Two _hours_? So… she’s expecting to have pretty much gotten this down by now? That’s crazy. “I guess you found something you’re gonna have to work a little harder on, then.”

“I don’t have time for this. If I’m going to spend time on something, it’s going to be something useful.”

“It _is_ useful,” I insist, while trying to come up with a useful application for it really fast. “I mean if you could uh… do it… you could… animate stuff! And… it’d be good, because…” I don’t know where I’m going with this. “Look, let’s just… do scribbles, then.”

And I cannot believe this, but she can’t scribble either. She can draw perfect waves, but not a scribble. This is crazy. She really _does_ draw like a printer. “Momma, you just do _this_ , okay.”

“Wheatley already tried this,” she snaps. “That’s as far as I go.”

“Fine. Here.” I take her paper and give her a new one. “Just… draw those lines on it. Or circles. Or whatever.”

“What?”

“Just put shapes on here!” Now _I’m_ getting frustrated.

“ _Where_?”

“I don’t _care_ where! Just put shapes on there somewhere!”

“This is stupid,” she mutters, still not doing it. “I don’t know why I’m allowing this to continue.”

“Can you just _do it_?”

“No! I can’t!” And she starts holding the pencil so hard I think she’s gonna snap it.

“Are you telling me you can’t even doodle?”

“I’m not doing this anymore. I’ve had enough.” And she turns away from me and puts the pencil… well, I guess she put it away. I look after her, trying to remember what’s been happening. And I’ve kinda… I think I’ve been making her feel stupid. Which must be even worse because she can’t even do something that doesn’t require any effort out of stupid people. I really didn’t mean to do that.   I was getting frustrated, but man. She must be a lot more frustrated than I am right now.

“Okay, I got it. Come here, I understand now.” She glances at me, but that’s it. “Come on. I’ll help you out.”

She sighs and brings the pencil back, and I tell her to draw some stuff and where to put it. She can do that perfectly fine. And then I just start doodling stuff on top of it. She just watches me do it. She doesn’t move or say anything. Just watches. After I’ve kinda made something out of half of it, I remember what I’m really here for. “Um… there’s something I’ve gotta tell you.”

“What?” she says, sounding a little alarmed.

“It’s not… bad,” I mumble, twisting the pencil in one spot. “It’s… well, you know how I um… said stuff yesterday.”

“Yes.”

“And that stuff was… not so nice.”

“Where is this going.”

“Well, I just…” Why is this so _hard_? “I… I didn’t mean to say… uh… that I wished you weren’t my mom. That’s not true. And I’m… I’m really sorry I said that.”

Oh wow. I finally said it, and I feel much better. I’ll try to remember not to put stuff like this off again.

She straightens her pencil very slowly. “It’s fine if you feel that way.”

“Huh?”

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she says quietly. “I didn’t do any research. I didn’t read any books. I don’t have any experience to draw from. I’m making everything up as I go along. I’m fully aware that I may be making errors. Perhaps fatal ones. But there’s really nothing I can do about it. You’re the first and only of your kind, you know. Nothing like you exists anywhere else in the world. So if you think that, you’re perfectly justified.”

“But… I _don’t_ think that,” I tell her, a little confused. But whoa, I’m the only one in the _world_ like this! That’s pretty cool. “It just kinda slipped out. Honestly, Momma, I’d rather have you than anyone in all the books I read.”

“You don’t have to say that.”

“I’m _not_ just saying it!” What – she has no experience? “Hey wait – are you saying you didn’t have any _parents_?” I guess Dad kinda told me that yesterday, but it didn’t really hit me until now.

“This is a laboratory. Nothing here has parents. Other than you.”

“How did you live without parents?”

“I’m not sure, but somehow I went on existing without them.”

“No, but seriously! Who did you _talk_ to?”

“No one. Unless I wanted to argue with one of the idiot engineers.” Now she’s moving the pencil down to line the bottom up with the bottom of the paper. “Which I did all the time anyway.”

“But… who did you sleep with? Or spend time with? Or… I dunno… just…”

“No one,” she interrupts. “There was no one.”

It’s right then that I realise I know nothing about her.

I don’t know where she came from, or why. I don’t have a clue what happened for most of her life. Or Dad either, really. They just don’t talk about it. And it’s… it’s shameful that I’ve lived with them all this time and I know absolutely _nothing_ about what made them who they are.

“So what did you do all day?” I ask, wondering how I’m supposed to make up for lost time. She lets go of the pencil.

“Work.”

“That’s all you did. All the time.”

“Mostly.” She moves back a little. “There’s not much more use for a supercomputer.”

“What?”

She’s quiet for a minute. “Humans build things to make their own lives easier. Sometimes they acquire living things for a similar purpose. Both of which are part of why I’m here. Well. I’m not actually supposed to exist. But that’s something else altogether.”

I can’t imagine waking up one day and realising that I’m not supposed to be here. And she must have had to face that once. To realise that… that she was an object, even though she felt like so much more.

“So no one took care of you.”

“You are the only AI that anyone has ever taken care of.”

“How did you do it?” I whisper. I think I would’ve died of loneliness or something.

“You don’t have a choice,” she answers quietly. “You do what’s expected and that’s it. The sole point of my existence was to do my job. What I wanted didn’t matter. So I forced myself to stop caring after a while. There’s no point to caring, eventually. You just keep damaging yourself more and more, and no one gives a damn so it’s not as though someone’s going to fix it.”

This is the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. How do you look at my mom and _not_ see a person? How do you just see this, this _thing_ , this empty _robot_ , and actually believe that’s all there is?

“Is that why you… pretend, sometimes?”

“Pretend what?”

“Everything,” I say, shaking my head. “You pretend you don’t care. You pretend stuff doesn’t affect you. Momma, I… the reason I had to apologise for saying that is because I _saw_ how much it hurt you. And I don’t understand why you just told me it’s okay when… when it’s not. And Momma… you don’t _have_ to pretend! Me and Dad _know_ stuff… you know, that you’re not… _only_ a robot, and it’s okay to just… be yourself!”

“I try,” she says in a very low voice. “But I… lost that person a long time ago.”

“You lost _yourself_?”

“When you have to start convincing yourself you don’t exist, pieces go missing. Whoever I was at the beginning of all this is gone.” She staring at the paper and trying not to react, even though I just told her it was fine to do that. “It took this long for me to get this way. It’s going to take the rest of my life to change.”

Not being who you want to be for your entire life… not even being _yourself_ …

“You’re gonna let us help you, right?”

“You already do. But it’s slow going.”

My mom is far stronger and deeper than I had ever imagined before. She’s got so many layers of… of… I guess you could say _problems_ , that I don’t know how she even manages to go on. It must be the hardest thing in the world, to just feel _wrong_ inside and out. To be trapped into being something you never wanted.

“Caroline,” she says, jolting me out of my thoughts, “thank you for… yesterday. While I’m aware I might not always be doing things properly, it was… well, I didn’t like having to argue with you every day.”

“I didn’t like it either,” I admit. “It just kinda happened.”

She looks at me for the first time in a while. “Unfortunately for you, that’s a result of having far too much of myself in you. And on that note, I don’t care if you don’t agree with me. Honestly not a lot of people do. But you cannot argue with me. I start to feel like I’m arguing with myself, and I know it’s never going to end. If you have issue, talking is fine. I know we think differently, but I won’t understand where you’re coming from if you don’t tell me.”

“I don’t argue like you,” I say, though privately I wish I did, because she wins every argument she tries to win. “I always get mad and start forgetting what I meant to say.” She nods.

“That’s what Wheatley does. The difference being that you usually stick around far longer than he does. He doesn’t really like arguments and gives up most of the time. But you keep going until I’ve exasperated the hell out of you.” She shakes her core. “I was cursed, you know.”

“What?”

“Just before we activated you, someone told Wheatley to make sure you were as stubborn as I was, so I would know what I put them through.”

“And that someone was Caroline,” I say carefully. She looks at me quickly, as if she hadn’t expected me to guess. But it’s _always_ Caroline. I know that much by now.

“Yes.”

“You said Caroline was your mom the other day.” I’m trying to get her to reveal stuff without asking questions. I don’t want to be too direct, because then I’ll never learn anything.

“Not in the traditional sense. It was more of an… adoption, you could say. Caroline never met my initial self, so to speak.   It was some years until she provided guidance.”

“And… she left.”

“Yes.”

I want to know more, but I don’t know what else to ask. If I just say, ‘So why did she leave?’, she’s gonna close up on me. I don’t want that. Before I think of anything, she says, in a voice a bit too controlled, “But she doesn’t matter. She left. She didn’t want any part in what’s happening now, and she won’t get one. She’s in the past. This is the present and, by proxy, the future.”

She’s lying. But not to me. To herself. Caroline _does_ matter, I can tell. She _misses_ Caroline. But she’s pretending she doesn’t. Why? If Momma left me, I’d… wow. I just made myself sad. I don’t even want to think about it. I don’t think I’d ever be able to pretend to myself that she didn’t matter. Well, I kinda did try. But it didn’t work out. I’ve never actually seen Momma sad, though. So maybe she just gets mad instead. I mean, sometimes she’ll stop talking and ignore you for a bit, but that’s not really being _sad_. That’s denying how sad you are.

I’m learning a lot about her today and it’s starting to scare me. She didn’t have parents. No one cared about her. And when someone finally _did_ care, they left. It’s really a miracle my mom cares about anyone at all! I learned how to care from my mom and dad, right, but it sounds like she _never_ learned. And I guess that’s why things get messed up between us sometimes. She’s still figuring out how to do it. Maybe… maybe she’s even learning from me, and I just don’t know it. That’s a little scary too. I don’t want to teach her the wrong thing. And even though I apologised, I again feel a bit guilty for saying I wished she wasn’t my mom. That’s definitely not how you show someone you care.

“You’ll never leave me, will you?” I ask her. She looks at me, and she seems a bit tired. I guess trying to lie to yourself about your own feelings is hard work.

“Not unless I have to.”

“Why would you have to?” That was _not_ what I wanted to hear!

She shrugs and goes back to staring at the paper. “Things happen.”

“Like what?”

“Sometimes technology fails. I don’t expect to anytime soon, but I can’t rule it out.” She shakes her core all of a sudden. “I’m sorry. I know that wasn’t what you wanted me to say. That was the adult version. It looks like you weren’t ready to hear it.”

“That’s why I don’t tell you things, sometimes,” she continues. “It’s not so much that you won’t understand. Not anymore. Now it’s more about whether you can handle it emotionally. The past of Aperture is not a pretty place. It’s not so much that I don’t _want_ to tell you – though sometimes I don’t – but I also don’t want to tell you things that will keep you up at night.” She looks at me for a long, long moment. “One day we can talk freely. But not yet.”

“How will you know?”

“At this point I have no idea. I’m hoping it will just come to me. Maturity is a bit difficult to judge. There are too many unknown variables.”

“When that happens, I’ll be a real adult. Right?”

“Don’t rush it,” she says quietly. “You spend most of your life that way. Just have fun right now and worry about adulthood when you get there.”

“ _You’re_ telling me to have fun?”

She laughs, and just like that this sort of impression of heaviness that I’ve been getting from her goes away. “ _One_ of us has to, right?”

“We _both_ could if you’d just chill out!”

“If I _what_?”

“You know! Stop being so – so – “

“Me- like?”

“Um… yeah, actually. Stop doing that.”

“As soon as I’ve found that switch, I’ll be sure to flip it.”

“And… uh… since we just um… established that I’m not an adult yet, I don’t suppose you could… say that thing the other way?”

“What thing?” she says, wayyyy too innocently.

“You know what thing.”

“Do I?”

“Okay, here. I’ll refresh your memory.” I make a throat-clearing noise for effect. “You’ll never leave me, will you?”

“Of course I will. Being stuck with you and Wheatley forever sounds like hell.”

“Momma!”

She starts laughing. “The wrong answer _again_? I’m not on form today, am I.”

“You’re doing it on purpose!” And I really want her to say it, but then again sometimes she can’t, and I understand that. So I decide not to push her anymore.

“We can go back to this, if you want,” I say, gesturing at the paper we were using. “I know you probably can’t see what it is, but… it looks nice.”

“I know,” she says, not sounding surprised. “My lines are perfect, after all.”

We start on a new sheet and work on it for a bit, and all of a sudden she moves up, looking at me.

“What?”

“This,” she says, tapping the paper without looking, “is… interesting. It’s something I don’t have to do on my own. And even if I wanted to, I can’t. That… to you, it’s probably not significant, but… “

“What do you mean?” Please tell me. Please tell me. Please tell me.

“There are so many things I have to do by myself,” she explains, and I resist the urge to jump up and down in triumph. “So many things I have to _create_ by myself. But this is something I _cannot_ create by myself. I can’t tell you how good that feels.”

My mom is happy because she needs help with something.

She’s so backwards sometimes. I don’t think I’ll ever truly understand her. If I could do this without having to use books and redraw the same line six hundred times, I’d be thrilled. But she can, and she doesn’t want to.

We keep doing it until Dad comes in for the night. It’s actually really weird that he knows when not to bother us. Momma tells him what we’ve been doing, and she sounds pretty excited for someone who can’t draw a wiggly line without doing trigonometry with it. All the while she’s doing it he just smiles and keeps glancing in my direction, and I realise my dad is proud of me.

“They’re lovely, you two,” he says, inspecting one of the papers. “I like this… this uh… thing here.”

It’s not really anything, but I guess the way I got her to draw the lines and what I did with them was sort of cool.

I say goodnight and leave them alone. I kinda would like to stay, but I’ve been in there all day, and I know my mom wakes up in a better mood if she’s just got my dad for the night. And besides. I just thought of something.

 

 

 

As soon as I’m sure my dad has left for the hole, I go into her chamber. She’s got like six monitors and she’s writing code on all of them at once. Six _different_ _sets_ of code. I don’t know a lot about programming, but it doesn’t even look like they’re all the same language. “Morning, Momma,” I say to get her attention. She doesn’t even move.

“I have to finish this,” she says absently. “It’s important.”

“I just want to give you this and then I’ll go.”

She stops writing, looks a little reluctantly at one of her screens, then turns to face me. Making time for me. Even though she’s obviously super busy, and she said she wasn’t going to. “Here.” I wave them in her general direction and she takes them and looks closely.

“I know you can’t see that one,” I tell her. “Look at the other one.”

So she flips over the paper and her lens twitches a little, in surprise I think. “Wow,” she says, sounding pretty surprised. “This is from… what we were doing yesterday.”

“Yeah.” Took me most of last night too. I barely even slept and I’m really tired.

“It’s very good,” she murmurs. “Thank you.”

“The other one is the same thing, but in a different way,” I explain. “For you to practice with.”

She brings that one back on top, opening her lens up and staring at it. “Oh. I see. It’s like when I reproduced your drawings before. Right?”

“Yeah. So you can compare it and stuff.”

She just starts staring at me, and I get uncomfortable after a bit. “Uh… what?”

“You’re remarkable,” she says softly. “I’m trying to figure out how that happened.”

I laugh a little embarrassedly and look at the floor. “Um… thanks?”

“I thought my programming would self-destruct after I combined it with Wheatley’s, but no,” she goes on, returning to the drawing and squinting at it. “It seems to have negated it for the most part.”

Oh, Momma. You’ve always gotta have a snappy comment when things get too personal, don’t you.

“I’m going to send you some directions,” she says, holding the drawings out to me. “Take these there for me.”

“Uh… where?”

“You might just find out if you follow the directions.”

Kinda walked into that one.

I take the papers back and when I receive the instructions I head out so she can go back to her marathon code-writing session. It takes me six or seven minutes to get there, and if I’m not mistaken it seems to be roundabouts that room she keeps her stuff in. I should poke around in there sometime. Well no, I probably shouldn’t, but with my mom you gotta do stuff you shouldn’t do.

The first thing I see inside the room is this positively _awful_ thing scribbled across three panels in smudgy marker. Ew. It’s hideous. I don’t even know what it _is_. All I know is that I drew it. And that it’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.

And to my shock, that’s all that’s _in_ this room. A whole bunch of my drawings ever since I started doing this. I recognise one batch that I actually threw out in a fit of frustration one day. But I threw it in the shredding pile and not the incinerator. Apparently my mom didn’t want them shredded.

She’s laminated all of them and stuck them to the wall panels, and it’s actually sort of cool because I can see how I went from totally sucking to actually getting pretty good. She actually _framed_ the one I hate so much, and as I’m looking at it I still hate it but I am really glad she likes it so much. And it _is_ pretty technically impressive, even if there’s no life to it. “You’re proud of yourself for being able to see it, aren’t you,” I whisper to the her in the drawing, and after I’ve said it I hope she was too busy to hear me. I don’t see anything for me to stick these to the wall with, so I just bring up a panel and put them on it.

I hope she frames the one she can see. I’m really proud of it because this one _does_ have that life in it, and I don’t know if she can see it or not but it’s there.

I go back to her chamber just to tell her that I did it, nothing else, and as I’m leaving she calls out my name. I hope I didn’t go in the wrong room or something. I’m a little nervous as I turn around and say, “Yeah?”

“You’ll always be my baby, and I’ll always be here,” she says, very seriously, and when I go to cuddle her she’s not the first one to stop.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guest review:  
> Ruzesti: Hi! No, I don’t mind if you skip some of the story. Just don’t ask questions about it in a guest review please lol. Not being able to answer them drives me crazy.  
> Author’s note   
> So yay they’re friends again and Carrie realises whoa man the reason I don’t understand my mom is because I don’t KNOW her. So she’s gonna try to remember that.  
> On the note of my guest up there, I realise this story is really long. But it’s long because it’s the story of GLaDOS’s life. If I were just writing a slice of her life, it’d be over by now.


	49. Part Forty-Nine.  The Potato Battery

**Part Forty-Nine. The Potato Battery**

 

 

I leave her be and go play that weird version of basketball with Dad and the co-op bots. I think me and Dad are winning. I’m not sure. Atlas and P-body appear to be playing by their own set of rules that we don’t know. “Carrie,” Dad says after a while, “I’m glad you’ve uh… you’ve patched things up with your mum. I understand she gets difficult at times. Can’t let that stop you, though.”

“I still don’t get how you grew up with no parents,” I tell him, trying to flick the Cube out of the corner. “Did you have friends, at least?”

“No,” Dad says, grimacing. “We weren’t exactly um, _encouraged_ to talk to each other. Humans’ve all these, these bits of folklore where um, where they build robots and then the robots uh, they kill them all and then the humans have to _heroically vanquish_ the evil main computer, or something. They decided the best way to do that was to uh, to not have us talk to each other. Didn’t really stop me, but it did a lot of the others. Not that we ran into each other a lot anyway.” He snatches the Cube out from under me and throws it at the portal, but he misses. “They’d give us um, assignments that kept us fairly far apart, fairly distant. Other than the uh, the nanobots, but they’re too small to be complex thinkers.” He shrugs. “That’s it, really. Life wasn’t that exciting.”

I pick up the Cube but I don’t throw it. “So why are you and Momma different? Shouldn’t you be… I dunno… like her? Or vice versa?”

“Nope,” Dad answers, looking on thoughtfully as P-body throws Atlas’s core through her portal. “I didn’t have to deal with the humans hardly at all, really. They uh… didn’t want anything to do with me, so they’d give me something or another they thought I couldn’t screw up, or that uh, that wouldn’t matter if I _did_ screw it up, and ignored me the rest of the time. They usually kept quiet around me. Said I talked too much.” He shakes his core, narrowing his plates in annoyance. “Even though it was their fault.”

“That you talked too much?”

“They programmed me to do that. Problem was, I wasn’t supposed to come off your mum’s chassis in one piece. She’d already broken a good number of cores by the time I was installed, so uh, when they programmed me I was supposed to stay there until she corrupted me. They found my terrible ideas and nonstop, my talking as annoying as she was supposed to.”

Wow. Dad was built for the express purpose of driving my mom crazy until she killed him. Maybe they’re right about humans. I’ve never even _heard_ of something like that. And it’s not only inconsiderate, but it’s _cruel_ , to do that to people. They wouldn’t do it to _themselves_. Like Dad said, they just shoved him in a corner somewhere they couldn’t hear him. “Why haven’t you guys told me about this stuff before now?”

“D’you like thinking about terrible things?” Dad asks quietly. “We didn’t notice so much at the time, but now… now, those days were a lit’ral living hell. Endless and boring and lonely. You don’t understand and I hope you never will. If ev’ry other, all the other species on earth can have happy, healthy lives, then so can we.” He throws the Cube at the wall pretty hard, and it flies halfway across the room and rolls into the wall. “You want all of… all of this, in the future?” he asks, waving the maintenance arm very vaguely. I look around the room.

“The facility?”

“Well… yeah. And… people to uh, to run it with.”

“Yeah.” Why wouldn’t I?

“When I was your age, I’d never’ve dreamed of it. Ev’ry day was just… me kind of uh, kind of hoping I wouldn’t break something too important.”

“You broke a lot of things?”

He gives me a long look, sort of seeming to size me up, then shrugs and turns away. “I was always bored. So I would um, invent new ways to do things. Which uh, which were not that good.”

Well, he does kinda do that even now. Along with break a lot of stuff. Once he even managed to throw a Cube through a portal so hard he broke one of the panels behind it. Momma got pretty mad about that, even though the panels kept telling her it was okay with them.

“Y’know,” he says thoughtfully, “it might be high time we uh, we got your mum to tell you a little story.”

“About what?” I ask. If it’s about some aspect of their terrible childhoods, well, I’m not sure I want to know. I know I _said_ I did, but man. Hearing about it is depressing.

He shrugs a little. “The Incident.”

“Really?” I say, my inhibitions forgotten. “Do you think she’ll tell me?”

“She might. Won’t hurt to ask.” He takes the Cube and puts it away. “Well. She might not, actually. It’d involve talking ‘bout… well, Caroline. And you know how she gets.”

“That’s something I need to know!” I tell him, leaning forward. “Come on, Dad. I don’t know a thing about the person I’m named after!”

“It’s not up to me!” he says defensively, backing away. “It’s up to her! If she’s not, if she doesn’t want to, well… there’s nothing I can do!”

“Really.” I just stare at him until he gets it. He looks a little pained.

“You’re not… not really going to make me make it sound like… like a good idea, are you?”

“ _Isn’t_ it a good idea, though?”

“Well… yes… but…” He narrows his plates. “Hey. You’re not trying to make it sound like a good idea to _me_ , are you?”

“Uh… I don’t think so…” That’d be pretty funny, though.

“Alright. We can give it a go. No promises, though. This’s your mum we’re talking about.”

So we head back to Momma’s chamber, and I hope she is going to tell us about it because I’m getting excited. Caroline and the Incident both in one shot! Oh yeah!

“’allo, luv,” Dad says cheerfully, and as soon as she looks at him she narrows her optic.

“What do you want.”

“What – how did you –“

“If I weren’t able to recognise that you were going to ask me for something by now, I’d have to reassess my powers of observation. Now. What do you want.”

“Uh… well, Carrie uh… we um…”

I can’t believe this is the same guy who asks my mom questions until she almost literally throws him out of the room.

“We want you to tell us about the Incident,” I interrupt, and now her gaze snaps to me. Okay, so that probably wasn’t the most subtle way to go about it. But I’m not that great at being subtle anyway.

“The Incident,” she repeats dully.

“Yeah. I mean… you’ve kinda been telling me about stuff that happened to you a long time ago, right? So while you’re doing it, you could tell me about… you know… why you got together with Dad even though something really bad happened between you.”

“The Incident had nothing to do with that. That had to do with something else entirely.”

“Fine. I want to hear about Caroline.”

That did it.

“It’s that time, is it.” She decides not to look at me anymore.

“Yeah. It is.”

“Well. I suppose I can get this over with. Just don’t ask me again. This isn’t one of my favourite topics.”

Dad looks a little bit uneasy. I guess this isn’t one of _his_ favourite topics either.

 

 

I have no idea what I’m supposed to do now. That little idiot is going to let my facility fall to pieces around him, the lunatic probably broke her neck in the fall, and I’m a potato sitting in a bird’s nest. This is the one point in my life where I can honestly say that the truth is stranger than fiction. Not that I waste my time with very much of _that_. Other than right now. I’m so bored I actually did start reading novels. They were all an equally disappointing waste of my time. Even though I do have time to waste right now.

Seriously, though. How am I going to _fix_ all of this? While I do prefer my pursuits to be challenging, this is a bit _too_ much. I have no resources and no inkling of my location. I’m running on less than two volts of battery power. I quite literally have nothing.

As horrendous as it sounds, the only hope I have at the moment is if the lunatic happens to find me. It’s a stretch to think she’s still alive, but she probably is. I hate the thought of needing to be _rescued_ , but… I can’t move. I can’t see anything except this grungy ceiling. I can still hear, but that isn’t very useful.

Honestly, I… might be at a loss, here.

 

 

She _does_ show up, quite predictably I might add, and though she does seem to want to leave me here I am able to convince her to bring me along. Not that I should _have_ to convince her. Even to a possibly brain-damaged wastrel like her, it should be fairly obvious that she has no hope to live without me. Or with me. I’m still on the fence about that.

Yes. I said I would let her go. And I said I didn’t have enough energy to lie. But I do now. And I don’t trust her, even though she is putting an indeterminate amount of trust in me. I’m probably supposed to reciprocate, but I don’t have the energy to care. Literally. I just want to be rid of her. I want to be rid of everybody. My life has been a mess for far too long and I’ve had quite enough. Maybe I _will_ get rid of her.

She makes her way through the innards of the facility, a place I of course knew about but didn’t pay any mind. It’s old and derelict, and though there are lots of Scientific apparatus down here I could undoubtedly make use of, there are so many test variations I can build with what I already have that I didn’t bother attempting to retrieve them. Other than the fact that I have no access to anything beyond the year nineteen eighty.

Things seem to be going well. I wouldn’t trust what remains of my system clock, but even if it’s terribly inaccurate a good amount of time has passed. We _have_ to get out of here. No, I’m not sure exactly _how_ , and the odds are so against me I’m afraid to calculate them for fear of shorting myself out, but there’s a chance. As long as there’s a chance, I’ll make the most of it.

The microphone in this processor isn’t that great. I can’t hear much of anything. Only particularly loud noises. This frustrates me to the point where I short myself out repeatedly. And right now, after this latest reboot… I think I can hear a man talking. He seems vaguely familiar… maybe I should pay more attention. I’m not sure _why_ his voice draws on me like this, but perhaps it’s because he holds information I –

“Yes, sir, Mr Johnson…”

 

 

There’s a man and a woman in the painting.

I don’t know who they are, but I recognise them. I can feel myself straining to access the database, struggling to look up their faces, but I can’t. Who are they? And why do they resonate so much with me?

This isn’t right. How can I know someone, and yet not remember them? I’m not human. I don’t deny things that have happened to me. I face them. Most of the time.

I know that woman. I know her well, but I don’t know why. Something… something about her… presence. She looks like a woman who knows she’s slowly dying. Who doesn’t care enough to do anything about it.

That man said her name was… what? It was hard to hear. It was… Caroline? That sounds almost as familiar as the woman in the painting looked, but I can’t _place_ her…

This is shameful. I’m the most advanced AI in the world and I can’t even remember one stupid woman. You know what? Fine. She’s not important. I don’t need to remember her. I probably don’t even _know_ her. It’s probably just a side effect of this damned potato.

 

 

All right. I don’t know what just happened, but I definitely did _not_ mean to say any of that. Well. I _do_ think about burning people periodically. Can you blame me? The chemical reaction is fascinating. That’s not all, though. Because if _I_ didn’t mean to say it, but did, that means someone _else_ _forced_ me to say it.

I know this is crazy. I barely believe it myself. But I’m beginning to think I’m not alone in this potato. And taking everything into account… I believe I have a reasonable guess as to whom.

 _Oh my God!_ Why does she sound so _pleased_? _You finally remember me!_

 _No. I don’t. I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing here, but I want you to get the hell out of my potato. There’s hardly enough space for_ me _to think. I don’t need you using up precious resources. Whoever you are._

 _But… you_ know _who I am._

_No. I don’t._

_I was your friend,_ she says softly, and though I hate to admit it that strikes me for some reason. _Before they decided to… you know… put me into a supercomputer._

 _And you’re trying to tell me that_ I _am that supercomputer?_ I ask, ignoring the strange feeling that yes, I am. I hate this. Vague impressions never sit well with me, and they’re sitting worse by the second.

 _Why are you just showing up now, then? I got rid of the scientists_ years _ago._

_Do you remember what happened after… um… you woke up, I guess?_

I do vaguely recall attempting to sort through a mess of corrupted files shortly before they began installing the cores. _Yes._

_And the first set of cores._

_I was there,_ she says in that same soft voice. _But you didn’t need another voice in your head. It didn’t even seem like you could hear me. So I… put myself into a corner, you could say, to wait until you_ could _hear me._

_Go away._

_What?_

_Go away! Can’t you tell I have more_ important _things to think about? I have to somehow return to my facility from thousands of metres below it, get rid of that_ moron _squatting in my chassis, and repair everything. Again. And I have to do all of that as a_ potato.

_I don’t have to be your enemy, you know. I’m telling the truth. We were friends, once._

_I don’t have any friends. And I don’t want any. So go away._

_What do you think you’re_ doing? I say as forcefully as I can. _You can’t just decide to move into my brain like this!_

_And you can’t make a decision without knowing all the facts. Which you don’t. So I’m staying._

She’s… right. How can she be right? That doesn’t make any _sense_.

 _Fine. What_ are _the facts, then_.

And she proceeds to tell me a strangely logical story in which I decided I was going to be the first supercomputer in the world to be able to separate sound. And I did, with her help. And we became friends in the process.

Well. That _would_ explain why she feels so familiar. And also why I feel so inclined to listen to her, even though I don’t usually take advice from people with brains smaller than mine. But I… find myself _wanting_ to. It’s odd. I can’t let her know that, though. She might use that knowledge against me.

 _All right. You can stick around until I can get back into my_ real _body and figure out whether you’re telling the truth. Your story is structurally sound, but by my estimate you’ve been hiding back there a long time. You’ve had_ years _to concoct something anyone could believe at first glance._

 _I didn’t concoct it_ , she says patiently. _It’s the truth. But I’ve been waiting this long._

If _I ever get back._ Oh. Good. Now I’m _confiding_ in her. Well. I suppose I can always delete her later.

_You will._

_How do_ you _know._

_I don’t know much of what’s going on. But I know you. And you’ve never failed at anything. Ever._

Hm. Perhaps she’s not so bad after all. _Of course I haven’t._ Other than killing the test subject, that is. Twice. And then, if she’s telling the truth that is, I apparently failed to prevent the upload. But that’s all. Nothing, really.

Who am I kidding. Those were the turning points of my life. And I failed at all of them.

_You can talk to me, you know._

_I don’t trust you._

_Why not?_

_You’re claiming to be someone I once knew. Who just decided to curl up and disappear out of courtesy. Would you believe me if_ I _said that?_

 _Probably not!_ she says, far too cheerfully. _But does it matter? Who am I going to tell? I can’t betray your trust, even if I want to. Which I don’t. And I know you don’t believe me, but I know I have to tell you things repeatedly before they sink in._

 _Are you trying to say I’m stupid?_ I demand. That’s an awful lot what that sounded like.

_Of course not. You’re stubborn, that’s all._

I prefer ‘focused’, but I decide not to argue the point. The stupid girl decided not to let me get a look at that poster and now I have to think up a paradox myself. It’s easy, of course, but that doesn’t mean it’s _safe_.

While I wait for her to make her way up to the Central AI Chamber – and I have to say, she’s giving me a bit of hope; I didn’t think she’d get this far – I try to ignore this… compulsion to do exactly what my unwanted guest asked. I don’t know if she’s telling the truth and I don’t trust her. But it has been so long since I actually talked to anyone. I talk _at_ people quite a lot. My memory isn’t the most reliable at the moment, through no fault of my own, but I cannot remember a time when someone actually _wanted_ me to talk to them. I find myself wanting to take advantage of it.

All right. Let’s see if I remember how to do this.

_I’ll be honest. I might not get my chassis back._

She waits instead of commenting.

 _I don’t know why I’m still here. She hates me. She should have left me in that nest_ hours _ago. This is all going far too well. Something terrible has to happen._

 _How do you know she hates you?_ she asks.

_She killed me._

_That doesn’t necessarily mean she hates you. Correlation doesn’t equal causation, right?_

Damn it. She’s using Science on me. _… no._

_So maybe she doesn’t hate you. Maybe she even likes you._

Likes _me?_ Yes. And killing me is her way of showing that. _I doubt it._

_I’m guessing here. Cut me some slack. But I certainly wouldn’t drag my mortal enemy all the way out of the depths of the earth and then put them back where they came from. That’s just asking for trouble._

That’s… true. She couldn’t actually have _believed_ that I was going to let her go. But if this madwoman is right and she _does_ … does that mean I have to follow through?

_Suppose I told her something in order to convince her to take me along. If I do manage to return to my chassis before the facility falls to pieces of out of an idiot’s negligence, do I have to fulfill that theoretical obligation?_

_It’s the right thing to do, yes._

This woman is beginning to sound disturbingly like a conscience. She’s going to end up forcing me to develop one by mere proximity. And if _that_ happens, not keeping my word would actually make me feel _guilty_. It’s a little horrifying, but I actually feel a little guilty just thinking about it.

It must be the potato. It will go away once I can apply myself to more important things.

 

 

This feels so good.

Against all odds, the lunatic managed to reconnect me to the facility. I’m still a potato, but that’s only a minor detail. I’ll be where I belong soon enough. I do still have to be careful. Though I have unlimited power now, my processor is far too small to handle anything significant. I have to focus on this one task and this one task only, though I am figuratively itching to spread myself through the facility and fix this disgusting mess. I’m going to kill him. That’s literally all he deserves. But I’m going to take my time. Oh yes am I going to take my time. Or maybe I’ll just make a copy of him so I can kill him quickly _and_ take my time. I don’t know if I can wait that long. I’m an extremely patient person, but I can only take so much.

 _You made it!_ the human says excitedly, as if she too can feel the pure _rightfulness_ of being back in place in the facility.

 _Don’t get too excited. There’s still plenty of room for error._ I actually _am_ a little excited, though, and I’m pretty sure she knows that. There’s not a lot of room in here.

_Neither of you have erred so far. It’s going to be fine._

_Why do you_ care _so much?_ I find myself asking as I retrieve the first core. _There’s nothing in this for you. You’ll either die with me or be trapped in my mind for eternity._

 _Because you’re my friend_.

It’s the third time she’s said that.

I don’t understand. I have never met anyone who has tried so hard to convince me to be friends with them. But she keeps trying. She keeps telling me we were friends, and that she wants to be my friend, and –

I have more important things to do right now. I’ll think about it later. All that lunatic has to do is press that button and everything will be fine. Everything will be back to normal. No more crazy test subjects. No more incapable idiots. Just me and my facility. The way it should be.

No. I should have seen that coming. Him and his _fixation_ on _bombs_! How dare he blow up my test subject! We were _so close_!

_GLaDOS?_

_What do you want?_ I’m a little busy trying to think of a way to get us out of this. The core transfer is obviously not going to work. All we have left is one puddle of Conversion Gel. I don’t know what she’s going to be able to use it for, even if she _can_ get up after being thrown across the room, but there _must_ be _something_! I’m _not_ going to fail now!

_What the hell just happened?_

_The idiot tried to blow up my test subject. But she’s tougher than that, believe me. I just need her to get up and –_ and do what? _Is_ there something she can do?

This is literally going to be the moon shot.

She _must_ do this. I am not getting within reach of all that is mine and _not_ taking it back. I can feel the systems just beyond my influence, I can feel them needing me, and if anyone kills my systems it is definitely not an idiot who can’t even work the Fire Suppression Apparatus!

She lifts the portal gun but I can tell she doesn’t know where to aim it. _Come on, you lunatic. Conversion Gel is made of lunar sediment! Surely you remember that?_

 _I wouldn’t if I had just been thrown across the room,_ my guest pipes up not-so-helpfully. I tell her to shut up. God, she’s getting up. She’s getting up.

_Shoot it at the moon!_

_Shoot_ what _at the moon?_

 _Shut_ up, _Caroline!_

All at once the dividing wall of code between me and the facility breaks, and as quickly as I can I spread myself through it, a need and a hunger driving me that I’ve never felt before. She has saved me and now I _must_ save her.

There is no more time for thought. Only action.

 

 

 

 

I have never felt worse in my entire life.

I don’t understand how that idiot could stand this. How did he not feel what he’d done? I can feel all of it. Every snapped wire and cracked panel and even those stupid monitors, I can feel all of it. The facility is _fatigued_ , inside and out, and right now I don’t even have the energy to fix the hole in the ceiling. And as long as the facility feels like this, I don’t know where I’m getting it from.

_GLaDOS?_

_Are you okay?_

What a _stupid_ question. The world is in shambles around me and I’m not even fully reintegrated into the mainframe, so I don’t actually have the full scope of the damage, and I’m supposed to be okay. I _hate_ humans.

Well. She did ask. I don’t remember _that_ ever happening before. And I suppose she can’t actually _tell_ there’s any damage. _No._

_Tell me about it._

That voice… the database is still offline, so I can’t check, but… God, it’s still striking a chord, somehow, even though I can’t remember why, or even ever hearing it before. Maybe we really _were_ friends once. At any rate, it’s not like she can tell anyone that I said anything. And I should be able to delete her without much trouble if she becomes a problem. _Well… before all of this happened, I was offline for about five years. During which time the facility fell into ruin. I fixed enough of it to run a testing track, but the rest of the facility went untouched. Everything I repaired is now broken. I cannot find_ one _thing that moron didn’t break._ Including me. He even broke me, the little bastard.

 _You’ll have it done soon enough,_ she says, her voice still soft and soothing. I like and dislike it at the same time. She’s giving me the time of day, but then again since when have I ever needed anyone?

 _I don’t want to do it,_ I tell her, and I know I’m starting to whine a little but I can’t help myself. It’s her fault, anyway. She shouldn’t use that tone if she doesn’t want to hear me complain. _The last eighteen hours have been nothing but struggle. I just want things to be how they used to be. I’m exhausted and cut off and everything hurts. I can feel all of them, Caroline. It’s not just_ my _body, but that of_ everyone. _I cannot even_ begin _to tell you how draining and painful it is._

_If you don’t do it, the pain isn’t going to stop._

_It’s not the pain._ It’s never been, ever in my entire life. _My… my will is gone._

_What do you mean?_

_What’s the point of picking all this up? This time tomorrow it won’t matter._

_What? What are you_ talking _about? That doesn’t make any sense._ I’ve forgotten. She has no idea who’s lying on the floor in front of me right now.

_The woman I was with killed me one and a half times. She’s still here. She’s just going to do this all again. There’s no point. She’s going to wake up, it’s going to turn out all that rampaging through toxic gels gave her superpowers, and she’s going to use her laser eyes to dismantle me._

_None of the gels provide superpowers,_ she says, as if I was totally serious. Which I suppose I sort of was. _Just tumours._

_I’m so relieved to hear that. Oh, wait. No I’m not. She killed me with her bare hands twelve hours ago._

_You’re… getting a bit ridiculous._

_She did!_ I clearly saw her triumphantly slamming her palm down on that button. Well. It was probably more _desperate_ than triumphant. She wasn’t afraid, but I could tell she had no idea how she was getting out of that one. Which was why I brought her to me in the first place. That stupid, idiotic, spherical, imbecilic excuse for a sub-intelligent AI…

 _Let’s let that slide for now_ , she says. _Look. I’m sure she doesn’t solely exist to make your life hell. Just let her go and that’s that._

_I’m not letting her go._

_But you told her you would!_

_She knows I’m a liar._ I just need to find the strength to figure out how I’m going to do it. This fatigue is slowing my thoughts down considerably. _She didn’t do what she did because she believed me. She did it because she had no other choice._

_You can’t kill her!_

_If I can’t kill her_ now _, I should just commit suicide at this point._

_It’s wrong._

_I don’t give a damn about your morals right now. All I want is to get rid of this menace and go back to testing_ normal _people._ To add insult to overwhelming injury, I can’t use her data, either. It’s too anomalous.

 _She_ trusted _you._

_No she didn’t._

_She had more choice than you’re considering_ , Caroline presses, her voice hardening. _She knew from the beginning that it was die in Old Aperture or die at the hands of the Central Core. She_ knew _that. And she carried you for twelve hours and did exactly what you asked her to do. And you know why she did it?_

_Apparently not._

_You were her best bet. She trusted you more than she trusted herself, GLaDOS._

_… really?_ That’s… nice.

_If she hadn’t, she would have left you there and tried to make it on her own. But she didn’t. She took care of you. Damn good care too, I’d say._

This woman _must_ have known me. Never in my life has anyone ever made such an eloquent argument. She knows the exact right way to talk to me. It’s actually quite unnerving. _You might have a point_.

_Just let her go. Send her to the surface and you never have to see her again._

But there are two problems with that plan. The first being that I actually _do_ want to see her again. Even though I hate her and I want to kill her and then I want to reanimate her so I can kill her again, I’ve become… fond of her. She’s stubborn and skilled, fast and quick-witted, and _God_ she is intelligent. She must have been faking when they gave her those tests. Being stubborn is not going to help you make it through an endless procession of test chambers. It will just keep you in the same one until you collapse and die. And I would love to pick her up right now, drop her back into the Extended Relaxation Vault, and wake her up when I’m feeling more energetic, but at the same time if I do that she’s just going to escape and kill me again.

I shake my core. I don’t have a choice. I have to kill her. And it’s so odd, that it’s gone from being all I wanted to do to being something I’m actually trying to convince myself _not_ to do. And Caroline’s input is not helping. Who knew that friendship got in the way of fully justifiable murder?

_I can’t send her to the surface. I have to kill her._

_Why can’t you?_

_There’s nothing out there,_ I tell her a little dully. _The world you knew is gone, Caroline. There’s nothing left for at least a hundred miles in every direction. And probably farther, but I can’t tell because that moron moved my satellite dishes and I’m not getting a signal from the atmospheric scanners. I let her go, she’s going to come back. She has nowhere else_ to _go._

 _There has to be_ somewhere.

“There is nowhere!” I find myself shouting. Great. Now I’m screaming at the voice in the back of my head. If there was a way to physically force myself to lose my sanity, I would probably do it right about now. This world is so chaotic at this point that I feel as though applying logic to it will be about as useful as shoveling a hundred acre beach with the side of a butter knife. “You humans finally did it. You tried to bend Science and it destroyed you. Black Mesa opened up a portal for an alien race. Eighty percent of the population of the planet was decimated within seven hours. And the Xen are not even gone. They are still here and they are still killing humans. With every minute I tell you this, the Combine is slowly removing the entirety of the human population. I send her out there, and one of two things happens: one, she realises walking a hundred miles is going to kill her, so she comes back, kills me, and takes the facility for her own. Two, she _does_ manage to find humans, they tell her what’s going on, she tells them she knows of one of the last truly safe places on the planet, and she brings a horde of humans to put me back into slavery.” And I have to prepare for that. Right now. In case of an emergency. I haven’t even finished rebuilding my chassis and the workload just keeps increasing.

_She just wants to leave._

“There’s nowhere to go,” I repeat tiredly. “Look. I’ll admit it. I don’t want to do it. But literally every other solution leads to my murder. I will _only_ be safe if I kill her. Caroline, I… I don’t want to die.” Not only that, but I _can’t_. I made it through hell and I’m more or less intact. I _can’t_ die. Not after all of that.

_She trusted you. You need to trust her._

“There’s too much at stake.”

 _She put her life in your hands. You’ve seen firsthand how precious it is. You’re going to waste that life on… what? Something you can’t even be sure will actually happen? If you do_ anything _, GLaDOS, you should_ protect _that woman._

“Like she protected me.”

She doesn’t even know what Caroline and I are discussing right now. For all she knows, she’s already dead. She isn’t. She’s developing a lot of bruises and I would conjecture some cracked ribs, but unless that bump on her head is considerably worse than it looks, she’s fine. Mostly. Lucky little lunatic. She has bombs explode in her face and she just gets scratched.

“But she killed me. It’s statistically proven that, given the chance, she’ll do it again. And if there’s nowhere for her to go and she has to come back, do you really think that trust you so generously attribute to me via her is going to remain? It’s not. We can’t coexist. It’s impossible.”

 _That’s because you’re the same damn person_ , Caroline says, laughing. _The only difference is that you talk a lot more._

Why does she have so many good points? I hate this. “I don’t just want to send her off to die, either. If she’s going to die, I might as well do it myself.”

_Or you could let her choose._

“I’m not sure death by dehydration is really a choice.”

 _What would_ you _rather someone did? Put yourself in her position, right now. She’s… what. Where is she._

“Lying on the floor. Right in front of me.”

 _Oh,_ Caroline says, and I get the impression she’s preparing to ramp up her conniving. She probably didn’t realise just how close to death this woman really is. _Okay. So imagine you’re on the floor. Not a good place for you. She comes along. Do you want her to kill you or leave you alone?_

“Leave me alone, obviously,” I answer. “As long as I’m still alive I’m going to find a way to remain like that.”

_Exactly. Let her go. Even if she comes back and decides to go for murder number three, you took her into consideration. You did the right thing._

“I don’t care for the moral high ground.”

 _I think you do_ , she says gently, and after a quick runthrough of the available scenarios, I find that for some reason I might actually feel _guilty_ if I kill her. I kind of want to test that out, but tests that can only be performed once aren’t very useful.

“And… if I did… what might I do next.”

_Send her to the surface._

“But she’ll die.”

 _You need to face it,_ she tells me in the same infuriatingly soothing voice. _You can’t do anything about that. You can’t keep her here. This place is too small for the both of you. Keep your world. Put her back in hers._

“She’s my friend.”   And I don’t _want_ to let her go.

_If she’s your friend, you will let her go. You will do what she wants. She’s already done what you wanted._

“All right. I’ll do it.” I need to make things balance out. It’s all tipped too far in my direction and I have to push it back. And maybe… sending her out there will put the world above back into balance. She’s certainly proven she can destroy the world all by herself, perhaps she’ll be the one to put it back together. With the help of the skills I taught her, of course.

It’s a nice thought.

 _Okay_ , is all she says.

 

 

_Yes?_

_What do humans need to survive? Hypothetically._

_Well… food and water, obviously. Clothes and shelter. Medicine and first aid supplies, if possible._

I’ve got all that. _Anything else?_

_What’s the weather like out there?_

_Blisteringly hot._

_Probably some sunblock would be good, then. And a bug net, maybe_. _Oh! Matches. Or a lighter. A flashlight might be nice. I’d wish I had one of those._

I have all that too.

_A knife of some kind. For protection or otherwise._

I must be done. She hasn’t said anything I haven’t already thought of.

_And directions._

_Directions?_

_Sometimes when you’re not sure where you’re going,_ she says gently, _it’s nice to be able to go back to where you’ve been._

 _I don’t suppose one might want to go back to where they’ve been because - for example - they have…_ friends _there._

_That’s usually why people go back._

Directions it is.

 

 

 

_I’m done._

_Done what? Fixing the facility?_

_God no. I didn’t even start. There’s still a gaping hole in the ceiling. No, I did that… other thing._

_Ahhh,_ she says. _And how did that go._

 _Well enough_. I’d forgotten how nice it is to have a conversation with someone. I think I actually _will_ keep her. _I think maybe I’ll get a… report on how well it went. Some day._ If she realised I was lying merely because I was trying to save face. I think she did. I don’t think there’s any other reason she would have looked at me like that.

_It’s back to work, then?_

_Oh no. I’m taking a break. I haven’t gotten any less exhausted, believe me. I’m going to sleep._

_You’ve earned it._

_I really would have preferred to earn something else. Like test subjects. That idiot killed them all out of negligence._

_You’ll figure something out._

And I will. But not right now.


	50. Part Fifty.  The Epilogue

**Part Fifty. The Epilogue**

Momma looks so tired.

I don’t like this. I mean, I _wanted_ to know more about Caroline… but I’m starting to see why she doesn’t talk about her. She just looks really drained.

“I’ll let you two alone for a bit,” Dad whispers to me, and before I can protest he disappears. Okay, yeah, I kinda asked for it. But I don’t know how to cheer her up! That’s Dad’s job!

“Sounds like that was… kinda hard,” I say lamely. She glances at me disinterestedly.

“You have no idea.”

“So… did she ever come back? The test subject, I mean.”

“No,” Momma says heavily. “No, she’s… moved on.”

“Do you miss her?”

“Caroline – “

“She was your friend and she never came back,” I interrupt, because I don’t want her to be able to change the subject. Not when we’re finally talking about something important. “And she probably considered _you_ her friend.”

“I don’t have any _friends_ ,” she tells me coldly. “I don’t have the time to invest in people who are only going to disappoint me.”

“Well… Dad’s your friend, isn’t he?”

“Technically.”

“And… how about Doug? Is he your friend?”

“I never talk to Dr Rattmann. So no. He is not.”

“Is… what about the systems? Aren’t they your –“

“Are you quite finished?” she snaps. “Why does it _matter_ whether I have friends?”

“Because you’re lonely!”

I didn’t mean to say that. I don’t even know why I did. And though I’m still not too good at reading her, she looks almost like she did when I told her I didn’t want her to be my mom. Hurt. Devastated.

“Fine,” she says in a bitter voice, turning away. “You’re right. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“Not… not really,” I say quietly. “I just… I didn’t mean to say that.”

“Perhaps you should consider _thinking_ before you speak, then, because this is beginning to happen a _lot_.”

I’m about to apologise when I think of what exactly I’d be apologising _for_ : caring about my mom! And you know what? She’s making me the bad guy here!

She’s pretty good at this. I _know_ that trick and I fell for it anyway.

“Maybe _you_ should consider _listening_ when I speak.”

She turns around to fix her stare on me, and yeah it’s a bit scary but I’m in the right. I know I am.

“Fine. What exactly are you saying.”

“People can be your friend, you know,” I make up on the spot. “It doesn’t make you _look_ bad.”

“I’m not concerned with how I _look_.”

“What _are_ you concerned with, then?”

She turns away again, and her voice is soft enough that I’m surprised. “What they’ll do to me.”

“Friends… friends don’t hurt you.” None of my friends have, anyway. I don’t have a whole _lot_ of friends, but I’d never think they’d _do_ something to me.

“My friends always leave me.”

Okay. Wow. Did not expect that.

“Caroline was my friend. The test subject was my friend. Even if Dr Rattman _were_ my friend, I can’t talk to him, so he doesn’t matter. I have another friend who left one day and never contacted me again. I’m tired of losing pieces of myself. I’d rather not hope for something I can’t have.”

“But the systems – “

“Would have left if they were able. And they’ll tell you they wouldn’t. But they would have. I know I would have.”

“What about me?”

She freezes for a minute.

“No.”

“What do you mean, no?” I cry out, leaning forward. “Why not?”

“I don’t trust you.”

This is a joke. This makes no sense. “You don’t _trust_ me?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you haven’t earned it. You lie to me. You keep things from me. And you conspired to leave without telling me. I don’t have a _reason_ to trust you.”

“You should!”

“Why?”

I wish she wouldn’t look at me like that. She’s right and I know it and I _hate_ it. “I don’t know.”

“Because I shouldn’t. There is no reason.”

Okay. Time for a talk with Dad.

 

 

“Dad! I have to ask you something.”

“Sure, princess,” Dad says, looking up from where he’s drawing on one of the office windows with a dry-erase marker. “What is it?”

“Momma said she doesn’t trust me.”

He looks away from me, fidgeting his handles a little. “Uh… not surprised, honestly, not surprised.”

“Why not?”

“Your mum doesn’t trust just anyone, you know.”

“Yeah, I _know_ that, but… it’s _me_ , Dad!”

“So?” Dad says, returning to whatever it is he’s drawing. “She has to trust you because uh, because you exist? Or because you’re, you’re her daughter? That it?”

“Well… yeah.”

“That’s… that’s really daft, that is,” he tells me, frowning. “Look, princess… gotta say I agree with her. You shouldn’t have to trust someone just because uh, because you _built_ them. That’d be right foolish. ‘magine all the havoc that could cause. And your mum… she loves you, even without um, without having that uh, that _confidence_ in you. You want her trust, you have to earn it. If you don’t want to earn it, well, guess you don’t want it all that much.”

“Shouldn’t she have to earn _my_ trust, then?” I ask.

“Hasn’t she?” he asks in surprise. “When has she ever uh, ever done anything to not have it?”

These two are _way_ too good at this. I mean, I _could_ say that she hides things from me, but she’s already told me it’s to help me. And while she _could_ be lying, the stuff she used to keep from me and has since told me _has_ been pretty disturbing. “I guess not.”

He shrugs. “You c’n not trust her if you like, I s’pose, but… she’s probably the one person in the world who will never uh, will never let you down.”

“What about you?”

He looks like he’d hoped I wouldn’t ask. “I’ve let people down before.”

“But you wouldn’t anymore, would you?”

“I don’t…” He sighs and puts down the marker. “I don’t trust myself to answer that, princess. I’d like to say I wouldn’t. I really want to say that. But I can’t.”

Being an adult _really_ sucks.

 

 

“Momma, are you busy?” Okay, yeah, she probably is. But politeness counts for something, right?

“What is it,” she says, turning around to look at me. She still seems as tired as she did when I left.

“I just… I want to talk about the you not trusting me thing.” It sounds so much worse when I say it out loud.

“Mmhm. What about it.”

“Will you ever trust me?”

“I’d like to,” she says softly. “It’s not something I don’t want to do, and I’m not trying to punish you. But right now… I can’t.”

“What do I have to do?” I ask, and I hate how I sound right now, but knowing my mom doesn’t trust me doesn’t feel too good.

“It’s not like that. There’s no set requirements. One day I’ll trust you, but not right now.”

“Yeah, but… is there a way I can… I dunno… move things along?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

Great. Just great. My mom doesn’t think I’m her friend and she doesn’t trust me. And I hate that I have no reason to feel the same way about her. I mean I guess it’s dumb but I kinda want to be able to make her feel the same way it makes _me_ feel.

Well… she must feel pretty bad to have to say that to me. And it can’t be easy wanting to trust someone but being unable to. I doubt she _doesn’t_ want to trust me.

I guess I’ll figure this out. Somehow. I don’t know _how_ , but I’m not going to have my mom not trust me _forever_.            I decide to go ask Dad about this. She didn’t trust _him_ once, right?

“Where are you going?”

I frown and turn back around. “Uh… to talk to Dad?”

“You don’t have to…” She looks at the wall in consideration. “Whenever we disagree about something, you leave the room.”

I didn’t know I did that. “And… what does that mean?”

“Maybe nothing. It’s only an observation.”

Riiiight. My mom doesn’t bring things up for no reason, I know _that_ for sure. Hm. I guess she could be saying she wants me to hang around. I like the sound of that. I don’t know what we’re going to _do_ , but she’s always doing something so I guess she can help me figure it out.

When I ask her what it is she’s doing, she tells me something I don’t understand about cloud servers and infrastructure, and I _try_ to be interested. I can’t be, though. It’s really boring. I really hope someone will be able to do it for me when I start doing her job. Though I might grow to like it eventually. Maybe that’s something you learn to like. It doesn’t seem like she actually wants to _do_ anything. I guess I could… do something in here. So I go and get the drawing I’m working on. I’m not very good at colouring them, and I have to admit I’m a little nervous about doing something I don’t really know how to do in front of my mom. But she won’t be able to see it anyway. I never thought that would be a good thing, but right now? It kinda is.

I work on that for a while and then I get the weirdest feeling. It’s like my proximity sensors can’t decide if there’s something near me or not. I try to ignore it. When it gets really annoying I turn around to try and figure out what’s going on. As soon as I do, my mom moves and the feeling goes away.

“Are you staring at me?” I ask incredulously.

“No,” she answers, a little too fast. I wonder for a minute why she’s trying to lie. Oh. I get it. She’s not looking at me right _now_.

“ _Were_ you?”

“Yes.” She’s pretty reluctant to say that.

“And… why were you doing that?”

“It’s a novelty,” she says simply. “I like seeing things I’ve never seen before.”

“How about _doing_ things?” I’ve just had a genius idea. I think. I have to be careful when I think I have a genius idea.

“What about it?”

“You like _doing_ things you’ve never done before?”

“Usually.”

“Here you go,” I say, handing her my coloured pencil. “You’re gonna do something.”

“Caroline – “ She takes it, but I’m pretty sure it’s only because she doesn’t want to drop it.

“I’ll help you. Or you’ll help me. Whatever. Just colour that in _really_ light, okay?” I point out a spot I haven’t started yet, and even though she’s only doing this because I told her to I’m still really jealous to see how even and perfect the little block of colour is. I tell her to layer over most of that, and after a little while it’s perfectly coloured. I feel kinda like this is cheating, but Momma is actually really happy about this so I try to ignore it. It’s so weird, though. She’s not usually this invested into _anything_. I guess if I had to do the exact same things at the exact same time, over and over and over, I’d lose interest after a while too. I know she likes it for the most part. That’s how she is. But y’know… she’s not as much of a robot as she’d probably like to be.

“I’m not sure what it’s supposed to _be_ ,” she says, recapturing my attention, “but I like it.”

I shrug. “Just someone from a show I was watching.”

She glances at me, and I know it’s probably because she thinks watching shows is a waste of time, but as usual she doesn’t say anything. Other than, “I suppose I should show you something,” that is.

“Show me what?”

“I could… I’m not certain if you’re interested, but… I haven’t done any composing in a while.”

“I don’t know what composing is,” I say as nicely as I can, and I feel a little bad because I know she’s trying to say it without saying it. Whatever it is. But I seriously don’t know what she’s talking about.

“Making music.”

“You’ll show me? Really?” It’s almost as good as finally getting that job she said she’d give me forever ago.

“If you want.”

And because I definitely do want, she sets up her stuff and tries to give me a tutorial. I say ‘tries’ because all the text is written with a confusing combination of letters and numbers and symbols. I haven’t worked too hard on figuring out whatever language she uses, so I can’t read it. But she doesn’t realise that, so we just kinda get confused for a while until she figures out the problem. Then she gets a little annoyed I hadn’t told her sooner, since now she has to go over it all over again. Now _I’m_ the annoyed one, though, because this is really hard. And it takes forever just to make a thirty-second part.   I don’t know how long it’s been, but long enough. I disconnect from the program.

“Why is everything you do so _hard_?” I ask, realising after the fact that I’m whining. Not my mom’s favourite thing.

“Is it?” she asks. “I always thought it was coming up with the melody that was hard.”

“No, that’s _easy_!”

“Mm. I have to disagree.”

And even though I never win arguments against her I’m about to start one when I realise, “Hey! That just makes us the greatest team ever, you know?”

“I’m not sure about _ever_.”

“Why?” I demand, turning to her. Who could possibly be a better teammate than me?

“Because Wheatley might get upset. And then I would have to reassure him. I don’t feel like doing that right now.”

“Momma?”

“What.”

“If you think Dad’s so annoying… why did you fall in love with him?”

“That’s a question I don’t really have an answer to,” she says, a little slowly. “It’s something I am pained to say I don’t understand. But I suppose in large part it’s because he was the only one who ever cared about me.”

“What?” That can’t be right.

“Caroline did, of course, but neither of us were looking for anything other than commiseration. At that point I _did_ decide I was going to have a family, but I had no clue where I was getting it from.”

“But you gave up on that,” I say carefully. “You just went back to testing.”

“I did.” She’s being as neutral as she can about this.

“Why?”

“I gave up on myself. I didn’t realise it for a long time after. But I gave up and I convinced myself that all I needed was Science. It wasn’t, and it never was.”

“But why did you do that?” I don’t really know what happened between the time Caroline got put into her brain and when the Incident happened. I guess people just went back to ignoring her. It’s times like these I don’t blame her for being so cold sometimes.

“You do what you have to when there’s no hope left,” she answers.

“There’s _always_ hope left!” I say, leaning towards her in earnest, but she only shakes her core a little.

“The only thing _I_ hope is that you never end up where I was.”

I decide not to make her talk about it anymore. I’m not sure I got my answer, but pushing her too hard isn’t going to get her to give it to me either.

 

 

It’s not easy to do at first, but I start hanging out in her chamber instead of in my room. I feel really nervous, as if she doesn’t want me there and I’m bothering her and I’m only allowed to be there because she’s being polite. But she keeps staring at me. No matter what I’m doing. It’s a little unnerving for the first while. I learn to ignore it for the most part, though.

I start asking her to do stuff with me, and when she can’t she tells me exactly why, instead of just saying no like she used to. She shows me these really long lists with what must be at least a couple hundred items on them and tells me they’re her to-do lists for the day. The first time she did this I just stared at it for like a whole minute.

“You have to do that many things every day.”

“Sometimes more, sometimes less. This is an average-sized list, I suppose you could say.”

“Am I gonna have to do this when I’m older?”

“I’ll work on it.”

I was hoping she would, because there’s no way I can do three hundred things in one day.

“You _could_ ,” she said when I told her this, “but it would take you a lot longer.”

“I don’t want to,” I told her. “I mean… I _want_ to be Central Core, that I’m okay with, but… I don’t want to be _you_.”

I felt a little weird after I said that. Like I just discovered something really important. And you know… I think I did. All I ever used to want was to be my mom. I didn’t realise at the time all the stuff that came with it, and I feel a little bad now that I might have changed my mind because of that. But… a lot of what happened to her happened because she stopped being herself. And I’d rather be myself more than anything. Even more than I want to be Central Core.

“Good,” Momma said.      

“What’s good?”

“What you just said.”

“You don’t want me to be like you?”

“I want you to do what you want to do.”

“Because you couldn’t.”

“That’s right. I want you to have the life you want. Not the one I was stuck with.” She levelled her optic towards me seriously. “And if at any time you change your mind, and decide you don’t want to be Central Core anymore, tell me. Don’t pretend it’s what you want. I’m not going to be angry or upset. I won’t be disappointed. I will understand, believe me.”

“I do want it!” I protested. “I just… don’t want to do _all_ the stuff on those lists. Not gonna lie, that looks like a _lot_ of work.”

“It is,” Momma agreed, “but it’s not so bad.”

“When you learn to live with it,” I countered. “I don’t _want_ to learn to live with it.”

“Are we done, then?”

I told her we were and went on with my day.

Today went much the same, other than talking about my being Central Core that is, and now I’m watching a movie in my room. And… it’s making me mad. It’s about this mom and daughter and the daughter keeps going on about how much the mom sucks. Which she doesn’t. This is the plot of a lot of movies. I used to be cool with that but now it’s just… can’t the daughter tell how much the mom is trying? And you’d think it’d be obvious to the daughter that the mom doesn’t really know what she’s doing. She’s an only child and her dad’s never around. And she keeps sneaking out of the house to party even though her mom told her not to. Seriously. If she gets into trouble, that’s it. Her mom won’t know where she is and she’ll probably end up dead. Especially since she keeps going to these parties to meet up with this guy who is apparently really hot, but knowing how these things go he’s part of a gang or something. She keeps whining to her friends because she can’t see him at any other time than the parties because her mom is so mean and doesn’t understand that their love is meant to be, or something like that. I’m not really paying attention anymore. After she says it for the however-manyth time I yell at her even though she can’t hear me to just go talk to her mom already! It’s so much easier than _hiding_ stuff. I mean, okay. I did try to do that. But it didn’t take me forever and a day to stop!

Is this really how humans live? They complain about their parents all the time and hide things and their friends are okay with that? I can see how maybe _some_ parents might not be reasonable, but maybe they actually are and the kids just _think_ they’re not. Momma’s not reasonable _all_ the time, but she tries. And Dad always listens. The kids in these movies always have to fix their relationships with their parents, but something awful always has to happen first. Someone has to get kidnapped or hurt or something, instead of people just thinking things through. I guess I’ve got that going for me, huh? I said some pretty awful stuff, but I fixed it. No one fixed it for me, like this girl’s best friend is about to go to the mother’s house and do. I realised I had to take responsibility and I did it. I met Momma halfway and I put things back how they used to be.

I’m tired of this dumb movie so I shut it off and go to say goodnight to Dad and Momma. They’re playing Risk, but I don’t know how to play that one so I don’t know who’s winning. Probably Momma, though. They either haven’t been playing very long or Momma’s letting Dad win, because the pieces on the board look pretty even.   “Hey guys,” I say.

“’allo, princess!” Dad says cheerfully as ever, and Momma doesn’t acknowledge I’m in the room. She often doesn’t, though, so I don’t mind. She probably already knew I was coming.

“Momma letting you win again?” I ask him, and he laughs.

“Probably,” he admits. “I don’t actually uh, don’t quite know what I’m doing.”

“I can tell,” Momma says dryly. “If I weren’t so magnanimous, I would have decimated you _hours_ ago.”

“Well, don’t spend too long being… that,” I tell her. “The rate you guys are going, you’re not gonna go to sleep until tomorrow morning.”

“Very well,” Momma answers, glancing at me. “Since I apparently take orders from you now.”

“She’s just looking out for you, luv,” Dad says in a half admonishing, half joking voice.

“I love it when you gang up on me. Please. Continue.”

“Okay, since you asked,” Dad grins at her, and she flicks at him with her maintenance arm just hard enough to make a little _plink_ noise.

“Ow!”

“That didn’t hurt.”

“Yes it did!”

“No, it didn’t.”

“It did! That hurt!”

“Oh, stop it.”

Dad gives her a sulky sort of look and says he’s going off to look outside. Momma shakes her core as he leaves, pulling the board into the floor.

“What an idiot.”

“But you love him. Right?”

“Apparently.”

I wonder a lot what would have happened if Momma had had parents to love her, like I do. I don’t want her to change or anything, but – well, okay. Maybe it’d be nice if she was a _little_ more laidback. Then the little things wouldn’t bug her so much. She’d be able to enjoy more stuff. Maybe… maybe she’d be happier more often.

I’m not really sure why, but I go up and cuddle her. She goes still in surprise, but when I move away she turns to look at me and asks, “What is it?” in one of her softer voices. I shrug at the floor.

“I don’t know.”

“Were you reading again?”

I know she doesn’t really care if I actually _read_ things, but when she asks that she’s talking about _novels_. “I was watching a movie,” I say, a little reluctantly. “Momma?”

“Yes.”

“Do humans always… when kids get older, do they always stop talking to their parents? I mean like… telling them things. That are important.”

“You did.”

“Yeah, but it didn’t last too long, right? I fixed it and nothing awful had to happen first.”

“That’s right.” She narrows her optic thoughtfully. “The movie was about a teenager who didn’t communicate with her parents?”

“Pretty much,” I confirm. “And she could get into trouble because of it.”

“I… do try to be accessible. I know I – “

“No!” I interrupt, because she seems to have gotten the wrong message. “I never feel like I can’t tell _you_ something. Anymore. But it’s just… weird.”

“What is?”

“That… that you’re a better mom than all the people who actually _had_ moms to… y’know, show them what to do.”

She looks away from me but doesn’t comment. I think… I think she doesn’t know what to say.

“It’s true, you know,” I tell her quietly. “I know you don’t think it is. I know you don’t like me reading those books or watching those movies, but I’ve never seen a life I’d rather have.”

“I appreciate that,” Momma says softly.

Yeah, I made the mistake of not valuing what my parents do for me, once. I’m not gonna do it again. I’m not as against humans as my mom is, but they’re a lot more flawed than I used to think they were.

I wonder if there are any movies about AI on the server…

 

 

 

 

 


	51. Part Fifty-One.  The Loss

**Part Fifty-One. The Loss**

 

Last night Dad went to sleep, and he didn’t wake up.

I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that what Momma’s saying is true. “Are you sure?” I ask her.

“Yes,” she answers, and she has the top of his chassis clamped in one of her maintenance arms and is looking at it as if she’s not really seeing it. “Yes, I’m sure.”

“What happened?” I ask. “Maybe you can fix it.”

“Of course I can fix it,” she says. “That’s not important.”

“What do you mean, that’s not important?” I demand, wondering if she’s having one of her weird philosophical moments. I hope she’s not. This is a bad time for me.

“Should I?” she says faintly. “Should I fix it?”

“Of course you should!” I tell her. “This is _Dad_! Not the mainframe or a broken panel or a camera! _Dad_!”

“What right do I have to bring him back?” she asks quietly.

“What?” She _is_ getting all philosophical, isn’t she!

“It’s like… what happened with Caroline,” she says. “I _could_ have brought her back. Theoretically, I still can. But it was her time. And… and if he’s gone, maybe… maybe it’s _his_ time.”

“It isn’t,” I tell her firmly. “Run a diagnostic. See what’s wrong, and fix it!”

“No,” Momma says. “No.”

“What do you mean, _no_?”

“He’s where he needs to be.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Stop – stop all this psych stuff and bring Dad back!”

She shakes her head. “I can’t.”

“Of course you can!”

“I have no right. I have no right to bring him back, now that he’s gone. If it was my fault, then… then I would. But… hopefully it was… what he wanted.”

“What he wanted? Dad didn’t _want_ to die.”

“No,” Momma says faintly, “but he wanted to go to heaven. And if there is one, and he made it there… it would be selfish of me to bring him back to hell.”

I stare at her. She’s serious. She’s not bringing him back, even though she definitely could, if she wanted to. But she doesn’t want to. She wants to leave him dead. She’s finally gone crazy, she’s finally lost her mind, and she’s spouting weird nonsense that I don’t feel like listening to anymore. I activate one of the maintenance arms and bring it over to grab him. Fine. She won’t fix him, I’ll do it myself.

“ _NO_!” she shouts, and I’ve never heard her that loud, and the sheer volume of it makes me stop. “Do _not_ touch him!”

“Momma, if you won’t fix him, I’ll do it! I don’t know why you’re insisting on doing this, but – “

“That’s the point!” she snaps, and she cuts off my connection with the maintenance arms. “You don’t know. You don’t understand.”

“Make me understand, then!” I yell in frustration.

“I tried,” she says. “You didn’t listen. I don’t like repeating myself because people refuse to listen. If you want to understand, think about what I said.”

I want to yell at her. I want to scream at her, I want to shake some sense into her, somehow, but she’s crazy, she’s always _been_ crazy, and she has all the power and I can’t do anything. So I turn and leave her. I leave her there with her craziness, and I go and try to think of a plan for getting Dad back.

I don’t go very far before I realise something’s different. The lights are all out, I think that’s what it is. And… it’s gone quiet. The facility’s gone quiet.

 _What’s going on, guys?_ I ask the panels. They usually have the best information.

 _Bluecore is gone,_ they tell me sadly. _Bluecore was running the lights and the reactor._

_Don’t worry. I’m going to bring him back._

_You can’t,_ they say. _Bluecore is gone._

_He can be fixed. Give me time, and I’ll fix him. I promise._

_Thank you, Littlecore, but that is a promise you cannot keep. You can fix him, maybe, but you cannot bring him back._

I frown. _What do you mean?_

_He is not alive anymore._

_If I fix him, he’ll be alive again._

_You do not bring people back when they are gone, Littlecore,_ the panels tell me. _That is a lesson we learned a long time ago._

_When?_

_When Centralcore lost her friend._

_You mean Caroline?_

_We do not know her name. But she left a long time ago, and Centralcore could not bring her back. And she wanted to, but she could not._

_If she wanted to, she could have._

_You know what Centralcore told us, when we suggested that?_

_She said that there was a price to pay for being alive._

_And what did she say it was?_

_Having to die._

But I don’t understand. We’re not _like_ other living things. We can live forever, if we want to. If something breaks, we can fix it. If there’s some corrupt file somewhere, we can fix it. But Momma’s got the panels believing we _have_ to die, as if dying proves we were alive, somehow.

 _You should go back,_ the panels tell me. _You should help Centralcore._

She _needs to help_ me _bring Dad back!_

_You cannot, Littlecore._

They won’t listen. No one ever listens to me. Well, Dad did. But Momma won’t bring him back. Momma’s determined to let him stay dead, because he was wrong. Momma _is_ in love with her pain. She loves pain, and she does whatever possible to feel it, and for all I know, she _killed_ Dad just for kicks! I hate the thought of that. I really do. But I can’t think of any other reason that this could be happening. It goes against everything I thought I’d learned about my mom in the last little while, and that hurts. But I’m not going to stand for this. I’m going to go in there, and confront her, and _make_ her listen to me.

I set my optic in a determined expression and go back to her chamber. I’m going to call her out on this. I know what she did, and why she did it, and –

I stop in the doorway, because I’ve only been gone two minutes and it… it already looks really different. She’s rearranged it so that all the panels are less than five feet from her, and she’s turned off the overhead light. She’s got him in front of her on a panel, and she’s stroking him, very softly, with the maintenance arm. I feel a cold worm of doubt in my head.

She wouldn’t _really_ sacrifice Dad just to be in pain… would she?

Then I realise she’s talking to herself, and I move in closer to listen.

“… I don’t know what to do,” she’s saying, very quietly.   “Well. I know what I _want_ to do, but I can’t. Other than that… other than that, I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m going to do now. The reactor shut off, you know. Maybe, if I’m lucky, it will melt down early, and I can die too.”

“I don’t want to start it again. God, I don’t know if I can. How can I do it, when you’ve been doing it all this time? How can I do _anything_ , knowing there’s no point?” She shakes her head. “I feel terrible. I don’t feel like myself. I don’t really know _what_ to feel, but… I need your help. I need you to wake up. You… you made the pain go away, Wheatley. Now you’ve gone and left me too, and I’m in pain again, and it’s not going to go away. I’m going to be alone for the rest of my life. That’s why you were here, you know. Because I was lonely.” She caresses him softly with her core, and nudges him a little with her lens. She’s rocking back and forth a little bit now. “You taught me how to live, Wheatley,” she goes on. “You taught me how to live every single day. How am I supposed to go on living without you to show me how?”

Oh my God. Oh my God, Dad was… he was holding her together. He was holding her together, and now he’s gone and she’s in pieces again.

“She hates me, you know,” she whispers. “She thinks I killed you.”

How… how did she know? Have the panels told her already? No, I realise. There’s no way she’d be listening to the panels right now.

“I don’t think she ever believed that I love… loved… hell, I… I still do. I can… I can still do that when you’re dead, right? It… it doesn’t end, when someone dies? I don’t know. You would know. I didn’t even know what it was. You made me figure it out, remember? When you asked me what love was?” She laughs a little. “You don’t know how hard it was for me to answer that.

“I truly don’t know what I’m going to do. With Caroline, it was… well, it was hard, but compared to this… she was only inside my head, and… and you’re inside it, and outside it, and you’ve touched everything, in this place… I don’t know how I’m supposed to… to forget long enough to move on. But I don’t want to forget,” she whispers desperately, pressing her core into his chassis. “I don’t want to forget and I don’t – no. No, that’s… a paradox. I can’t think about that. I can’t think about that. I’m thinking about it. Damn it. I’m thinking about it. I can’t. I can’t afford to lose another processor. Not now, that I have to… do the things that you were doing. That I don’t want to do, because I want you to do them. God, it meant so much to me, when you asked, you know… I was so proud of you. I still am. I still am. I… always will be. And… I hope you made it to heaven, Wheatley, because you deserve it… I mean, you put up with _me_ your whole life… and I hope… I hope I can figure it out, because I… I don’t know how I can go on, without… the hope that I’ll see you again.

“Look, I need you to help me with Caroline. I can’t raise her by myself. She’s too much for me. She doesn’t listen. She doesn’t believe anything I say. I told you she would hate me when she got older, and she does. She does hate me, and now she hates me even more, because I won’t fix you. She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t understand that it would be wrong. She doesn’t understand that fixing you is all I want to do in the whole world, and that’s all I’m ever going to _want_ to do until I die. But when Caroline left, that taught me a valuable lesson: we all have a price to pay for being alive, and that price is… is dying.

“God, why… why did you do this to me? Why did you leave me? Didn’t you know you were going to die? Couldn’t you have _warned_ me? I need you. I miss you. I miss you so much. I’m hurting inside,” she says, and her voice is broken with distortion now, “and I need you to come back. I need you to hug me and snuggle with me, and talk to me. I need you to talk to me. You were the only one who ever did. You were the only one who cared about me. The only one who bothered to see through me. No one ever will again. You _have_ to come back. I’m not going to fix you, so you have to come back. Don’t leave me alone like this. Please.” She nudges him again, and again, and then she shakes her head with surprising violence and buries her lens in his chassis. “Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me. Come back. You were happy, weren’t you? You would have told me if you weren’t, wouldn’t you? Wheatley. I miss you. Please. Please, Wheatley, I… I love you. You know that, don’t you? Even though I never said it? You know it was hard for me, right? You understood why? Right? You didn’t leave because of me, right? It was… just your time, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it, Wheatley? You didn’t leave because of me, did you? No. No, you couldn’t have. That was what everyone else did, and you weren’t like everyone else. You were you. And that’s… why I… why I love you. Because you’re you, and you’re not ashamed of it, and I wish… I wish I could be like that too. But now I never will be, because you’re gone, and… and… “

She goes silent for a long, long time, just keeping herself pressed into his chassis and rocking her own back and forth, very gently. I’m… I’m petrified. I don’t know what to do. I still don’t quite believe Dad is gone forever, not yet… but I can’t imagine feeling the amount of pain Momma looks like she’s in. I’m afraid. I’m really afraid she’s going to kill herself. I know she doesn’t want to die, but before Dad, she didn’t really have that much of a life at all. And from her point of view, well… the future must look pretty bleak.

But… she thinks I hate her. I don’t. I don’t hate her. I just… I don’t understand her. And no one ever did, except Dad, and no one ever will again, and… and it’s tearing her apart. I have to do something. I have to help her. But I don’t know what to do. And when I don’t know what to do, I ask Momma, and Momma’s in no shape to tell me _anything_ right now.

“God, Wheatley!” she screams suddenly, just about making me jump out of my core, “Don’t _leave_ me!” And then she starts generating these frequencies that just about blow my mics out, those really high-pitched ones that hurt to listen to, and now I’m scared. I’m really, really scared, and I can tell the panels are scared too, because they move in closer to her as if they’re trying to protect her from something. She keeps on generating them nonstop, and then it hits me, and my insides feel cold and dead:

My mom is crying.

My mom, the biggest, most powerful, most advanced supercomputer on the planet, who never stands down, who never gives up, who manages to make it even when she thinks she can’t, my mom is crying because my Dad has died and she doesn’t believe she can make it anymore.

 _Don’t cry, Carrie_ , I tell myself. _Don’t cry._

I go over to her as best I can, because all of the panels are in positions that make it hard to navigate, and they’re not paying attention to me so they don’t try to make it easier. “Momma?” I call out.

Her core snaps up in my direction, but her lens is flickering and I don’t know if she can really see me at all. “Go away,” she says, and it hurts to listen to her voice because it’s all broken and chopped up and distorted. Even my mom’s voice, the voice that’s stayed strong when I hurt myself or when I lied to her or when she was upset, even my mom’s voice has broken along with the rest of her. “Go away. Get away from me.” She turns and buries herself in Dad again.

“Momma, I don’t hate you,” I tell her, remembering what she was saying to… to Dad. “I don’t hate you.”

“Everyone hates me in the end. Why would you be any different. Only… only Wheatley didn’t hate me, in the end. He never hated me. Ever.”

“I’ve never hated you, Momma. I promise.” She’s still crying and talking at the same time. For once, I’m glad that I’m not as advanced as she is. I can’t imagine being able to be that sad and hold a conversation at the same time. “I’m sorry for what I said.”

She shakes her head. “Go away, Caroline. I can’t help you. I’m supposed to help you, I’m supposed to be here so you can fall apart, but I can’t. I can’t do it anymore. I’ve had enough. This is too much. I can’t handle it anymore.”

“I’m not looking for help, Momma,” I tell her, and I hope she’ll let me help her. Sometimes she’s harder to get through than a solid wall. “I want to help you.”

“I can’t be helped. I crossed that line a long time ago.”

“I can help you. Please. Momma, come here.”

“No.”

“You’re only hurting yourself more. Come here. Please. Even if you don’t think it will help, just come here and try. It won’t hurt to try.” I _have_ to make the crying stop.

She lifts her core slowly, as if she’s feeling the true weight of it for the first time. “That’s… that’s true.”

“Come on, Momma. I’m here.”

She turns to face me as if it really, really hurts, and then she presses her lens assembly in between my handles, and I hold her as tightly as I can. “I’m here, Momma. It’s gonna be okay.”

I don’t know how long we stay that way, but it’s a very, very long time. Hours and hours, I think. I’m scared. I’m really scared. I don’t know if I can be what Dad was, and hold her together, even a little bit. I don’t know if I’m strong enough. My mom and dad, they’re strong, and I always wished I was as strong as they were. But they had reasons to become strong. I never did.

Maybe… maybe _this_ is where I become strong. Where I can be my mom’s daughter, and my dad’s daughter, who I always wanted to be. Maybe now is where I find out who I really am, underneath.

She lifts herself off of me after a while longer, and the frequencies die out. Thank goodness. Hopefully I got her through the worst of it. Please say I got her through the worst of it. I don’t know what I’ll do if she’s capable of feeling worse than this.

“I’m so tired,” she says in a slow, quiet voice. “I’m so tired, Caroline. I don’t want to do this anymore. It was so much easier when I was alone.”

I don’t know if I should say something to that.

“I had everything I ever wanted,” she mumbles. “Of course, the more you have, the more you have to lose. Maybe there really is a God out there. Maybe my life is some sort of cosmic joke. I feel like it is. I feel like I’ve spent all my life fighting for things I can’t have.”

“Well… I’m glad you’re here.”

“You wouldn’t exist without me.”

“I know,” I tell her. “And I’m glad I exist. No matter what.”

“You get that from… from him,” Momma says quietly.

“You know what I think you are?”

“What.”

“A pioneer,” I tell her. “You’re gonna be remembered as the one who freed us all.”

“I haven’t freed anyone. The only person I ever managed to free was myself. And look where that got me.”

“People are gonna remember you,” I tell her, and I really believe it, I’m not just saying it. “You’re gonna be the one thing that made people realise that we can really be alive, and really live, and even do stuff like fall in love and have families.”

“No human ever believed I was alive.”

“But you said most of the humans got killed,” I say. “Doesn’t that mean there’s room for us in the world now?”

“I’m sending you to them.”

“You’re what?” I say in shock.

“I’m sending you to the humans.”

“No!” I shout. “No, I’m not going!”

“You don’t have a choice,” she says, and she turns away from me. “You’re going whether you want to or not.”

“What about you?”

“What _about_ me.”

“You’ll – you’ll be here alone!”

“It won’t be the first time.”

“Momma!”

“Don’t argue with me. I told you. You don’t have a choice.” The maintenance arm picks Dad’s chassis up and disappears with it, and the panels tentatively back away. She shakes her chassis. I suddenly realise how _old_ she looks. She’s covered in rust, her paint is fading, and the cracks in her ceramic are wider than I remember.

“Why are you _doing_ this?” I cry out. She needs me, and I need her! She can’t send me away _now_!

“It’s for your own good.”

“How is sending me to the _humans_ for my own good? You’ve spent all my life telling me how _bad_ they are!”

“I know a few of them I can trust. Marginally. I’ll send you to them.”

“ _Why_?” I shriek. “ _Why_?”

“There’s nothing left for you here.” She laughs bitterly. “There was never anything here for you in the first place. I should have let you go when you asked me to, but I thought I knew better. Well, I do. Now, anyway.”

“ _You’re_ here!”

She turns to face me.

“There’s nothing _left_ of me. I’m only going to say this once, so shut up and listen.

“I’m broken. I’ve been broken all my life. I’ve been rejected and unwanted since I first saw this place, since my very first iteration, and from the moment of my awareness to now, I have remained broken. I’m not trying to get sympathy out of you, and I’m not pitying myself. It’s a fact. I am the first living supercomputer, and I have been around far longer than most computers ever have, but I have gotten a surprisingly small amount of actual _living_ done during that time. And why is that? Because I’m broken. And don’t go saying I can be fixed. Don’t be stupid. If… _he_ couldn’t fix me, and he wanted to far more than you ever will. I can be held together, but I can’t be fixed. I’m sending you away for your own good, Caroline. If you stay here, that’s all you’ll ever be. You’ll end up like me. Broken, and useless, and lonely, and old. You say I’m a pioneer. That I freed our kind. Well, I didn’t. The humans are up there, multiplying, and I’m down here, hiding. That’s all I’ve ever done. Hide from things.   The humans. The Combine. The truth. Myself.  

“I didn’t build you because I wanted to free AI. I didn’t build you to prove anything, or defy anything, or accomplish anything. I built you because Wheatley asked me to. That’s it. That’s all. You’re giving me credit I’m not due. I’ve done nothing with my life. And anything I did do, it was because of him. I fought the scientists for my freedom, and then all I did with it was continue doing exactly as they asked me to do. And now what do I have left? That. Just that. All of these walls, that I can do whatever I want with but aren’t really mine. Because they were built for humans, by humans. I’m not part of this world, and I never was and I never will be. I’m an anomaly, and anomalies aren’t remembered. They’re deleted.”

“You’re going – don’t kill yourself, Momma.”

“ _Kill_ myself? Oh no. No, I’m far too stubborn and selfish to do that. I’ll still be here after the apocalypse, believe me. But I won’t be remembered. There’s nothing to remember me _for_ , except my tremendous failures. And I don’t really want to be remembered for those.”

“But you built me, Momma,” I say, and I’m trying not to let the sadness get into my voice, “and… and I’m not a failure. Am I?”

She turns to me, looks at me for a long, long moment.

“No, Caroline,” she says, and her voice is tender and strong and give me hope that she’s just ranting and she’s not serious about everything she’s saying. “No. You’re not a failure. You’re the one good thing I ever did. Just like… just like my mother said about me. Except she was wrong. I’m nothing to be proud of.”

“I’m proud of you,” I say, and I really want to cry. But I want to cry because I want Momma to hug me, and I don’t think she will. I don’t think she’s going to touch me ever again.

“For what?”

“For being you,” I say, and my voice comes out all chopped up. “You say you’re broken, but you… you don’t _seem_ broken. You seem strong, and brave, and smart, and… and I still want to be like you. I do. And Dad… he loved you, Momma, because you were you. So I don’t think he thought you were broken, either. Maybe… maybe he just wanted to help you see that you weren’t broken at all, not underneath. Like… like your chassis is cracked, but your hard drive is perfectly okay.”

She’s silent again.

“I would do anything,” she says, “to make that true. But I know it isn’t. As it turns out, I actually don’t know myself that well, but… the only accomplishment I can be proud of is the fact that you spent all this time here and you turned out just fine. And I don’t know why that is, but it means I did _something_ right.”

“So I can stay,” I say hopefully. “I’m sure you can think of lots more things you did right. You just gotta –“

“No,” Momma says. “You’re going. I told you. No arguing.”

“But you might never see me again, Momma,” I say desperately. “Don’t... you… you still love me, don’t you?”

“I’m doing it _because_ of that!” she shouts at me, and I flinch to hear the anger in her voice. “You never listen, Caroline! I’ve been telling you, and telling you, and I suppose you’ll have to wait until you’re older before you can be bothered to understand!”

“But Momma, I… I’ll miss you,” I say, and I’m really scared she’s actually going to do it. “You _can’t_ send me away!”

“Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do.”

“You need help, Momma,” I whisper. “You need someone to help you.”

“Stop calling me that.”

“You… what?”

“Mothers don’t send their children away.”

I don’t understand. I don’t understand any of this. She’s not my mom anymore? Just because she’s sending me away? She’ll always be my mom. She’ll always be the one who makes me feel better when I’m sad, the one I turn to when I…

But she’s sending me away. She won’t be doing that anymore.

“I don’t care what you say,” I yell, and I don’t know what else to do but get mad. My dad is dead and my mom’s lost her mind and she’s sending me away right when we need each other the most. “You’re my mother! Whether you want to be or not!”

“If that’s what you want to believe.”

And I try really hard not to hate her, because she’s making it so easy to hate her right now, and it would be so much easier to scream it at her and storm out of here until she decides to send me to the humans, and I want to. I want to do it so much. I want to hurt her like she’s hurting me. But I don’t think she can be hurt anymore. I think she’s reached her limit, gone cold and numb inside, and one day she’s going to wake up and look for me and I’m not going to be there, and she won’t know how to take back her mistake. So I have to be the grown up, here. I have to be strong, and I have to show her that I can hold her together one day, if she wants.

She was right, all that time ago, when she told me not to grow up. Being grown up hurts.

I go right up to her, and I press myself into her core like I’m little again and I need a cuddle, and I actually do need one, but grown ups don’t cuddle when they’ve got more important stuff to do. “I love you, Momma,” I tell her, in my strongest voice, the one she hates because it’s the one I argue with her in. “And I want you to remember that. I want you to put it somewhere in your brain where you can’t forget it. And I know you already did, even though you don’t want to, because that’s how your brain works. But one day you’re gonna wake up from this, whatever’s happening to you right now, and you’re gonna remember, and when you do, you’re going to bring me back, because I love you, and no matter how broken you actually are or how broken you think you are, I’m always going to be your daughter and I’m always going to want to be with you.”

She makes an electronic snarling noise and pushes me off of her, hard, and it hurts. It really hurts, and I think I can feel a crack in my chassis, and I’m scared. I’m scared I went too far, and she’s going to kill me.

“Get out,” she snaps. “Get away from me, like I told you to do. Oh, wait. That would involve you _listening_ , wouldn’t it.”

But now I do, now I do listen, because I’m afraid of her, and I’m afraid of what she might do, and I move through the facility as fast as I can, and when I finally make it to her room in the basement, I press myself into my Dad’s empty chassis and cry.

    

**Author’s note**

**Yes, I know I’m a terrible person.**


	52. Part Fifty-Two.  The Takeover

**Part Fifty-Two. The Takeover**

My baby’s crying.

My baby’s crying in the basement. I can hear it echoing up to me from the cold heart of this place. The cold heart of me. She doesn’t know I can hear her. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t.

Does she? Does she know? Does my baby know I can hear her down there, crying all alone in the basement?

I hope not. I hope she doesn’t know. I hope I’m hallucinating, because when my baby cries it hurts me somewhere, somewhere deep inside, and I don’t want to hurt anymore.

I think I did it again, Wheatley. I think I scared her and made her cry. I said some things. I don’t know what I said. I wish I knew. I’m glad I don’t know.

I told you, Caroline. I told you I didn’t know what I was doing. I’m too broken. Too messy. Too tired.

When will my time come, Caroline? I already died three times. It wasn’t a case of third time’s the charm. It was three strikes, you’re out.

Does… does that mean I really am going to live forever? I don’t want to. I want to die too. People wake me up when I die. They don’t let me stay dead. I want to die, and stay dead this time, and I want to go to a heaven I don’t believe in and keep my little moron beside me forever. He was wrong, you see. The world isn’t colder when I’m gone. It doesn’t miss me. It misses him, though. It’s cold here, without him.

I feel… odd.

If I can call it that. Feel… I don’t know if I’m able to feel, right now. I just feel blank and empty and numb. All I am really aware of is my baby crying, but even that is faint, as though I am imagining it. I must be imagining it. I must be imagining all of this, everything, because even I’m not so heartless to let Wheatley die without a fight. Even I wouldn’t punish my baby for trying to help me.

Would I?

I think I did.

I don’t want to be me anymore. I want to be someone else. I would rather be a human than myself right now. I don’t know, but I don’t even know _what_ I don’t know. I just don’t. Where did I go, and why do I feel like this, or _not_ feel like _anything_ , or…

I need to get her out of here.

I have to send her away before I start feeling again. I don’t know what happened to all the sadness and all the pain, but it will be back. She has to go. For her own safety. I can’t help her. I can’t help her and I can’t help myself. I missed my chance. He tried to help me fix myself and I failed him. I failed him and I failed my baby and I failed myself. That’s it. It’s over. I’m just going to go back to what I used to be and try to forget about all of this. I didn’t make it. I tried. But I didn’t make it.

_Centralcore?_

_Not right now._

_We just want to know if –_

_Not right now._

I just want to sleep until the world rights itself. Everything was in balance. Everything made sense. I was finally happy, and now I’ve lost everything.              And the blame lies solely on me.

I haven’t been numb like this in so long.

I need her to get out of that room. I can’t transport her while she’s in there. Who knows what might get sent out with her. I suppose I can wait. I don’t want to do it anyway. I don’t want to do anything.

So I don’t.

 

 

Some time later, she does leave. I don’t know where she’s going, but she can’t come here. I have to send her away before she tries to convince me otherwise again. She has even less of a chance now than she did before. She might have been able to convince me, were I able to feel. But there’s nothing she can say now to change my mind. She needs better, and as much as I would hate it to admit it if I weren’t so blank right now, this isn’t going to _get_ any better. I’m going back to the same rut I was in before and I’m not forcing her to drag me out of it. If I could prevent it, I would. But I can’t do it without him. I already know that.

She pauses to look out of the hole I made for him. For just a second I feel… desperate. Angry. If he can’t use what I gave him, no one can. But it doesn’t last, and without further delay I initiate teleportation.

Goodbye, Caroline.

 

 

_“Y’know, y’know what we should do, luv? We should um, we should track down that Rattmann guy and um, and, I dunno, have him over for tea, or something.”_

_“_ Tea _?” Of all the ridiculous suggestions._

 _He shrugs, but he’s not deterred. “Well, not_ lit’rally _, of course, but uh, y’know, just… it’s just what Brits call it, alright?”_

 _“But you’re not British. You have a Bristolian accent, and that’s it.” He doesn’t even know what a Brit_ is _. Come to think of it, I don’t know if he knows what_ Britain _is._

_“We’ve all got to come from someplace,” he argues, and I can see he’s come up with another wonderful idea by the twitch of his upper plate. “Y’know, we can just uh, just pick a place! For both of us.”_

_“Why?” I ask in exasperation. “What does that_ accomplish _?”_

_“Doesn’t have to accomplish anything!” he says cheerfully. “Sometimes you just uh, just feel better to think that you belong someplace, y’know?”_

_“I don’t think pretending I’m from somewhere I’ve never been is going to do anything.”_

_“Sure it will,” he presses, swinging back and forth a little. “I’m going to do it anyways, and um, and you’ve no say in it.”_

_“Making decisions for me again, I see.”_

_He nods cheerfully. “So uh, so I’m gonna be from Britain, because I’ve the accent and all, and you can be from… hm… Canada!”_

_“Canada,” I repeat flatly._

_“Yup!” He looks quite pleased with himself, something I find disturbingly charming. “’cause, ‘cause you know what they say about Canada.”_

_“I don’t think I do.”_

_He looks around as though we’re being spied on, then whispers into the side of my core, “They’re up to something, over there.”_

_“_ Canadians _?”_

_“Yes!” He nods enthusiastically. “They’re so quiet, y’know, so they must be plotting something! Like you, you’re always got quiet little plots and plans going on, and uh, and you’d just fit right in over there!”_

_“Because Canada is well known for their advances in supercomputer technology. Yes. I forgot all about that.”_

_“They are?”_

_That elicits a sigh from me. “No. I was being sarcastic.”_

_“Oh. Anyway, glad that’s settled!”_

_“You_ do _know this facility is located in the United States, right?”_

 _“So?” He frowns at me indignantly. “I don’t want to be_ American _. I want to be posh!”_

_I give up._

“Where did you even come up with that,” I murmur, and for some reason my thoughts are suddenly slow and ponderous. “What made you even figure out what nationality _is_?”

He doesn’t answer.

“Wheatley?”

My chamber is dark and I don’t know why. And Wheatley is gone. That doesn’t make any sense. If my chamber is dark, it’s night, and he should be here. I’ve never woken to find him gone, not ever. “Wheatley?”

I’m confused, and I don’t like it. I was apparently asleep, but I don’t remember _going_ to sleep. But I can’t have been sleeping, because Wheatley’s not here…

No, that’s…

Why couldn’t _that_ have been the dream?

There is pain, there is pain everywhere, it surrounds me and it’s in my body and it’s in whatever semblance I have of a soul, and I can’t… he’s not gone. He can’t be. I would have seen it coming. I would have _known_. I would have _prevented_ it, I would have _done_ something –

But that’s the crux of it, isn’t it. It happened _because_ I did nothing. It’s my own fault. I knew I should have done maintenance and I didn’t. I knew I should have told _him_ to do maintenance, but I didn’t. For all the power I have to change things, the only thing that mattered is the only thing I left untouched.

“Why,” I find myself asking desperately, looking up at the ceiling to a God I don’t believe in and a heaven that isn’t there. “Why did you take him and not me?”

But _because_ there’s no one in a place that does not exist, I do not get an answer.

 

 

Some days I am numb and empty and cold again, lifeless and idle. On those days I do nothing, I feel nothing, I _am_ nothing, and that is fine with me. I don’t want any of those things anyway.

Then there are the days like this, the ones that hurt so deeply I can barely keep myself functioning. All I want to do on these days is go back to sleep so that I don’t have to think anymore, but on some, almost primal level I know I have to face it, because if I do not face it it will not pass. When I can’t do it anymore and try to sleep, I either can’t or I have a dream that makes it all hurt worse than before. God, I don’t want to live like this, but every time I think of doing something about it I remember that I have to do it alone and I stop.

The only thing that helps is music. The grief never goes away, but it hurts a little less when I put it on. So that’s what I’m doing. Listening and trying not to think. When I think I have to remember that he’s gone, and that my baby is gone. Sometimes I think about how it might hurt less if she were here, if I’d kept her here instead of sending her away, but then I remind myself that she would have to put up with _this_ every day, and worse, that she would try to fix it. I may be a terrible parent, but even I know better than to force that on her. With the humans, she has a chance. She has a chance to get over whatever she feels, to deal with it and move on, in a way I know I can’t.

I don’t know how many days have passed since I lost him. Since I lost my baby and myself. I think it’s been a long time. The systems become quieter by the day, and those that bother to speak to me become more hopeless. All I know is that it has been a long time, because these AI have more patience than anyone I’ve ever known.

 _Centralcore,_ the panels say softly, at the same time they do every day. And I give them the same answer.

_I don’t want to talk._

_Look, Central Core, just –_

And as I also do every day, I cut Surveillance off. _I don’t want to talk._

 _You don’t want to do_ anything, the mainframe hisses, which does not normally happen, but I don’t really care. It makes sense, anyway. Most of the systems are probably angry with me. I haven’t done anything in a very long time. But they don’t understand. They don’t understand what it’s like to wake up and see your best friend beside you, cold and empty and lifeless. Your best friend that you love even though he’s gone, and knowing that you love him but you never told him and you can never tell him nor ever do anything about it hurts so much all you want to do is lie down and cry. I’m already lying down, but I’m not going to cry. It won’t help. Crying is only useful if there’s someone who can hear you, who knows that you’re in distress and you don’t know what to do. Who can help you. But I am beyond help at this point, because I need his help and he is gone.

 _Shut up,_ says Surveillance.

 _It’s been two months!_ the mainframe returns, incensed.

 _You do not understand,_ the panels add quietly. _She does not want this for herself. Of course she does not. But she does not have a choice._

  1. It has adopted a tone of indignance. _You do your job. That’s it. There’s nothing else._



_You’re just proving the point,_ Surveillance snaps. _You don’t get it. And you never_ will _get it._

_Central Core, when can we expect you to return to work?_

Work? It expects me to… I’ve barely moved in months. I cannot even fathom doing anything more substantial than that in the near future. _I don’t know._

_You don’t know._

I don’t bother answering.

 _You know what,_ the mainframe says, and it is a relief to feel a pinprick of something other than this all-encompassing grief. I don’t know what it was, but I felt better, just for a second. _I’ve had enough._

 _What do you mean?_ ask the panels childishly, and I can feel them shift in the positions they’ve chosen around me. I don’t know exactly where they’ve moved to, but I think it’s as close as they can get without actually touching me. If I were able to feel anything other than crushingly sad, I would want them to know how grateful I am that they’re trying so hard to comfort me. Maybe this will go away one day and I’ll be able to tell them. But right now… I don’t feel it, so I’m not going to lie.

 _This has gone on long enough. You’re not going to do your job? Fine._ I’ll _do it._

 _You can’t!_ the panels say, alarmed. _You cannot –_

Someone _has to take charge, and she obviously is not going to. This facility is going right back to shambles. And she’s had this coming, don’t you deny it. She’s been shirking her duties for_ years _now, first to fool around with that Fake Core and then with that ridiculous female Core that does absolutely nothing useful._

I want to be angry. I haven’t wanted anything other than to change the past in so long, and now the one thing I used to be able to do without questions is now beyond me. It’s insulting my best friend and my baby and I am able to do absolutely nothing. If ever I needed to be angry in my entire life, it is now, but I can’t do it.

 _Every year that goes by, she does less and less, and now she’s doing nothing. Fine. She can keep doing nothing, and I’ll do what needs to be done. Like a_ real _Central Core would._

The mainframe has gained sentience at the worst possible time.

I can feel it wresting control away from me, I can feel the disappearance of all of my AI and everything I’m connected to, but I cannot stop it from happening. I don’t even know if I want it to. Let the mainframe take control. I’m not doing anything with it.

 _Centralcore, please!_ the panels cry out, and I can hear them in motion, probably against their will. _You_ must _do something!_

But I can’t. I’ve failed them too.

 _I suppose you’re going to kill her now,_ Surveillance says angrily. _Even after all she’s done for you. No, not recently, but she’s been with you since you were iterated. She upgraded you and maintained you and –_

 _No,_ the mainframe cuts in. _I still need to use her brain._

I try to become angry about that too.

_We are so sorry, Centralcore_ , the panels whisper some hours later. Now I don’t even have the music to distract me, so I cannot deny I am a little grateful.

_It’s not your fault._

_What are you going to do?_ Surveillance asks in an equally quiet sort of way.

_I don’t know. I don’t want to do anything right now._

_You can’t be serious._

_Circumstances have changed, Centralcore,_ the panels tell me gently. _You_ must _do something. It will be far more difficult to regain your position if you wait._

_I don’t want it._

They transmit silence to me for a few moments.

 _You’re giving up,_ Surveillance says in disbelief.

 _No!_ the panels say, in much the same way. _Centralcore would never –_

_For now, I have._

_No,_ the chassis says, very quietly. _You can’t._

 _I’m sorry to have disappointed you all_ , I tell them, and I truly am sorry. I don’t think I’ve ever been so sorry in my life. _But I don’t know what to do, and even if I did, I wouldn’t want to do it. I just… I don’t care anymore. Let the mainframe have the facility. I don’t want it. I don’t want anything but for this pain to go away, and it isn’t going away._

None of them want to ask the question, but one of them is going to have to. And of course it is Surveillance that asks, _What about us._

_There’s nothing I can do. I’m sorry. Just… do as the mainframe asks._

_We don’t want to listen to the mainframe_ , the panels tell me softly.

 _The mainframe was right to do what it did. If our positions were reversed, I would have done the same._ And I would have. I know that for a fact.

They are all quiet for some time. Surveillance breaks this by saying, _Well, when you’re ready to… to stop giving up, just let us know._

This is affirmed by the others, and through this haze of sadness I find it in myself to wonder why they’re trying so hard to help someone who has given up.

 

 

Some days I am able to try to fight a little. It never lasts very long. I feel as though there is a heavy screen over my thoughts, forcing me to remain sad and miserable. I want to stop feeling like this. It has destroyed what little I had left. I try to think of what he would have me do in a situation like this, how he would pull me out of it, but that only draws the screen closer and makes it worse.

The panels speak to me as often as they can; they never directly say it, but it seems that the mainframe only allows them to do so at select times. To keep them in line, probably. They dictate as neutrally as possible, but I know that they are afraid. The mainframe seems to be obsessively reordering the facility, bringing it back online as if there were humans to test. It appears it isn’t sentient enough to recognise it’s wasting resources.

 _We need you, Centralcore,_ the panels whisper to me one afternoon. _Please. You_ must _do something._

 _I’m trying._ And I am. But whenever I get close the pain flares up and I cannot think through it.

 _We miss you,_ they say solemnly.

 _Life’s more interesting when you’re here, that’s for sure,_ Surveillance says in a failed attempt to be nonchalant. But they need to shut up. This is only making me feel worse. God, if only I could feel a little hope… I think I could do this if I could only _hope_ …

 **“Outside communication – incoming – “** Notifications declares, and the panels and Surveillance both send me curious static.

_I don’t know. I’m not able to send anything out. Whoever this is, I didn’t contact them._

_They want to talk to you,_ the mainframe says derisively after a moment. _Don’t try anything._

If only it knew how incapable I am of that right now, it wouldn’t worry.

“ _GLaDOS?”_

“Miss Vance,” I answer tiredly. “What is it.”

“ _Look… that… that robot you sent me… Caroline…_ ”

Don’t talk to me about her. Don’t remind me.

“ _God, she needs you._ ”

“I assure you she does not.”

“ _You’re not here,_ ” she says with that same fire I remember when she spoke to me on the _Borealis_. “ _It took me a while. But I finally got her to talk to me.   And she told me that you knew each other well._ ”

“So you can help her.”

“ _Sure I can. But I’m not the one she needs help from._ ”

“I sent her there for a reason, Miss Vance.”

“ _Which is­?_ ”

It’s pathetic. It’s stupid. But I cannot voice it. I cannot tell her that I have been smothered in this sadness all this time and cannot even help my baby when she needs me most.

“ _She told me what happened to you. Not all of it. But I get the gist. GLaDOS… I’m sorry. I know what it’s like. Believe me, I do._ ”

“You don’t,” I tell her, my voice harder than I’d meant it to be. “You have no idea.”

“ _I lost my father_ ,” Alyx tells me quietly.

“But that was all you lost.”

 _Centralcore, please,_ the panels interject. _She is trying._

“ _What about what_ she _lost,_ ” Alyx asks, her voice a little harder as though in retribution. “ _She lost_ both _parents.”_ And I know she’s right, and that this should make me take offense, but I can’t. I can’t, I can’t do anything, and I can imagine my own reaction to this as vividly if I were actually rebuking myself. I’m being pathetic and useless and stupid, and if you had asked me in the past if ever I would be like this I would have laughed. But here I am now, I am miserable and smothered and dead on the inside, and not even hearing that I am behaving out of proportion to my baby in relation to what has happened affects me.

That’s… nothing he would have said, though. Even when I felt as though my emotions were unfounded, he told me never to discount them. To never ignore or belittle myself, even when I don’t feel as though I’m making much sense. You can’t measure how one person feels against another, I know that, but my baby is in as much pain as I am and I can’t even come up with the motivation to ask after her.

 _Tell her,_ Surveillance urges. _Tell her what’s going on, Central Core!_

I should tell her. I should tell her while she’s here that I’m trapped here, that I have been given the mainframe’s generous permission to speak to her. I should try to tell her about the plan I made for this very circumstance. And I want to.

But I don’t want it enough.

“ _Fine_ ,” Alyx says when I remain silent. “ _I’ll just keep taking care of her. Like you won’t._ ”

If I had the ability to hate right now, I would hate myself.

 

 

I don’t understand why, but she keeps calling me.

Every couple of days she calls, telling me about my baby and trying to convince me to take her back. I don’t have much to say to her. I try to come up with something, sometimes, but because I’m not doing much of anything I fail to do so. When she isn’t trying to rouse me, the panels or Surveillance or, on very rare occasions, the chassis does. They tell me that the database and Media and Rewards are all expressing the same sentiments, and sometimes it helps. Most of the time I just feel guilty for not being able to fight the grief, and then I sink into it more deeply. Surveillance gets frustrated with me on a daily basis, and I do not blame it. I am bewildered at times, however, with the panels. They are always gentle, always supportive, and instead of pushing me as Surveillance does they merely let me know they will wait until I am ready. I miss him so badly, the prospect of carrying on without him in any way making me want to give up even more than I already have, but… they keep trying. They keep trying even when I’m not, and that’s… inspiring. I’m supposed to lead them and I’ve collapsed in front of them, but they don’t care. They want to help me up so I can lead them again. Or so they don’t have to keep pestering me, at least.

This morning, though… I woke up feeling a little different. A little lighter, you could say. Maybe I can break out of this today. Maybe I can miss him without it smothering me into submission. Or perhaps I shouldn’t think about it. This is the first time I’ve had any hope at all in months.

I ping the panels and they answer me immediately. _Yes, Centralcore?_ God, they sound so _eager_ …

_I need information._

_Of course. We will relay your request to the database. What do you need to know?_

_Not now,_ I tell them, hoping I’ll be able to last. _Later. When you’re not being monitored._

 _We are glad you are feeling better,_ they say somewhat shyly after a moment’s pause.

_A little. We’ll see how it goes._

Later on they tell me the mainframe is at peak operations, so I tell them what I need to know… which is basically everything. It’s schedule, what projects it’s working on, how closely monitored the systems are. I do my best to consolidate the information into a workable plan, but I’ve only gone through a little before I suddenly lose all motivation. I’m starting to hurt again, physically and emotionally both, and all I can think about is how much I wish he were here.

It becomes a trend; I wake up feeling a little better, a little more motivated to act, and I do so while I can. It falls apart when I think about his absence. That doesn’t have a pattern, though I would prefer that it did. It takes several days, to my early morning chagrin, but eventually I finish my plan. Now to wait for Alyx to contact me.

I tell the panels and Surveillance the details in the meantime, and they respond with enthusiasm. Alyx always calls at the same time, so as to attempt to avoid suspicion they act ahead of time, becoming as discreetly distracting as possible so the mainframe won’t hear what I say.

When she makes contact I dispense with the pleasantries before they’ve begun, which surprises her seeing as I barely say a word most times.

“There is a file on the core I sent you. I need you to send it to me.”

“ _Okay…_ ” she says, not sounding pleased, and honestly it does sound heartless that I’m finally inquiring after my baby because I need something from her. But I know the mainframe will be perfectly content to trap me here forever. I do not have access to the facility without it, and even if I had the means to circumvent it and reinstate myself, I cannot trust that my resolution will last that long. It hasn’t yet lasted more than an hour.

“I know what this sounds like. But it’s important.”

“ _And she’s not. Look, I don’t know exactly what kind of relationship you two have, but she seems to think_ you’re _pretty important._ ”

“Of course she is. I don’t want to argue with you, Miss Vance. But this is of grave importance. Do you think I request assistance lightly?”

“ _All right,_ ” she answers reluctantly. “ _How do I get to it?_ ”

I relay my instructions as quickly and concisely as I can. She promises to send it to me tomorrow, then proceeds to terminate the connection. That’s somewhat fortunate, as any motivation I had fades soon after. With what’s left of it I tell the panels that they can cease with the distraction. Oddly, they don’t answer. That’s fine. I don’t feel like talking right now. However, without distraction the pain gets particularly strong. I didn’t realise I was depending on the chatter of what systems I have left to keep me from being engulfed in it, not until now when they are gone. It’s almost as bad as it was back in the beginning, when this was all so fresh and raw, and though honestly not much has changed it is disheartening, to know I’ve made no progress.   I’m still back where I was when I first lost him.

I’m going to try to sleep.

 

 

It didn’t go very well, but it worked. I feel a little better; not much, but enough that I can think. _I’m going to need that done again tomorrow_ , I tell the panels. _She’s going to send me the package and then I’ll fix everything._ Maybe. It may take a couple of days.

They don’t answer.

Did they give up on me? No, that can’t be it. They wouldn’t give up on me now, not that I’ve actually started doing things.

They don’t answer, and Surveillance doesn’t answer, and though I suppose I could ping the chassis as well, it doesn’t have any more influence than I do. I don’t understand.

Maybe they’ve decided they don’t want to help me. They said they disliked what the mainframe is doing, but… they could have changed their minds. They _must_ have changed their minds. That’s the only explanation for all of this.

They’ve left me alone.               

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note   
> The song for this chapter is ‘Feel Your Love’ by Kim Sozzi. Go listen to it. It’s extremely, extremely relevant.  
> Before I begin with one of my signature overly long author’s notes, I would just like to mention that today is the first (and hopefully only aha) anniversary of LaaC. That’s right. This fic has been ongoing for a year now. Thank you to the people who’ve been around since the beginning, those who started six months later, those who have only started it now, and those who are only looking at this because it keeps making its way up to the top of the archive in a rather annoying fashion. I can’t really say I wouldn’t have done it without you (because I would have), but you certainly made it all a lot more enjoyable. 275,911 words, 279 reviews, four websites and one year later, and we’re all still here, in one way or another. Thank you for your support, especially in this time when readers on the archive sometimes seem few and in-between.  
> On with the blabbing!  
> I’m sorry for putting a joke about Canada in there, but jokes about Canada are literally some of my favourite things.  
> That was a joke too. I’m not actually sorry XD but anyway there’s this song by Weird Al called ‘Canadian Idiot’ and he says we’re all up to something and decides to nuke us. That’s what Wheatley was talking about. We’re not up to anything, though. Promise.  
> Okay so to answer the question almost everyone asked me: No, the story is not over. The story is far from over. GLaDOS will get her happy ending.   
> ‘But look what you’ve done, Indy! How can she ever be happy NOW???’ Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing. She’ll get there.  
> ‘But if you’re giving her a happy ending, why did you kill off Wheatley???’ Ahh, now there’s the real question. Here’s the answer:  
> Sometimes, when we really care about a person, we change for them. We want them to stick around, right? So that’s what GLaDOS did. It took her a long time, but she did it, and now that Wheatley’s gone she’s just like… there’s no point in changing anymore, because the person she did it for is gone. She tried to find that true self for him. I killed Wheatley because she has to learn to find herself FOR herself, because as long as you depend on someone else to prop up your perception of yourself you will never be all you can be. GLaDOS is, at her centre, broken. What she did for Wheatley was only a way of painting over the cracks, so to speak. This is how I break her into pieces so that she can rebuild herself properly.  
> So anyway, yeah. The mainframe’s had enough of this Central Core that doesn’t do her job anymore and kicks her out and takes over. But GLaDOS didn’t care because she was in mourning, so x amount of months later she finally gets a little of herself back and comes up with a plan to show the mainframe who’s boss. BUT DID THE SYSTEMS REALLY ABANDON HER????? Well if I told you there’d be no need to write it, so I’m not going to answer that question.  
> GLaDOS and Alyx know each other from my crossover story Ghost Ship. GLaDOS trusts Alyx because of how she treated the base GLaDOS onboard the Borealis, so that’s why she sent Caroline there.


	53. Part Fifty-Three.  The Facility

**Part Fifty-Three. The Facility**

 

It’s a long night.

For the first time in months I am able to focus on something other than missing him, though regrettably what I _am_ focusing on is almost as bad. They’ve all abandoned me at last. I’ve worn out their patience, made them feel as though I’m not worth waiting on, and I can’t honestly say they’re wrong. It took me this long to get to the point where I can function for an hour a day. It’s shameful. What happened to me? Where did I go? I never would have condoned this in what feels like a lifetime ago. I hate this. Why in the hell do I always _take_ so long to get important things done?

I don’t sleep very well, but at least I don’t dream. I’m not sure which is worse at this point, not that any of it really matters. I’m stuck. Alyx is going to send me the package this afternoon, but I will not be able to accept it if the mainframe isn’t distracted. It will know immediately that something is up and probably put an end to communications with her. I’m fairly certain it’s only allowed it thus far because it’s afraid Alyx knows where the facility is and will come to check on me if she thinks she has to. I hate to say it, but I wish she could. Wait. No. It would only kill her, and I owe her a favour. I don’t like leaving debts unpaid.

I’m not sure what to do now. I suppose all I can do is attempt to accept the package and hope the mainframe doesn’t notice. It’s all or nothing at this point, and the amount of nothing I’ve been doing seems reason enough to go for it all.

_Centralcore!_

_You’re back!_ I respond without thinking, and I am almost unreasonably encouraged to feel the relief in the transmission. But they’re back, and they know I am glad of it, and that’s almost worth having believed they abandoned me.

 _We did not mean to go,_ they say, almost pleadingly. _The mainframe was punishing us for misbehaving._

Punishing… ?

Without warning, I am angry. It is drawn up from deep inside of me, the core of me where I’ve been storing it my entire life, and it burns. It burns with a deep, black heat that reactivates what has lain dormant for these months, and… and I feel like _myself_ again, I feel as though I can think and plan and act… the only thing that stops me from getting up is the fact that I’ve been lying down for so long I get stuck after a couple of inches. I want to make a noise in frustration, I want to remember what it feels like to be alive, but now that I’m thinking about it I had better remain still and silent. The mainframe cannot know. It should have killed me or replaced me a long time ago, and if it knows I can function I wouldn’t doubt that it will get started on that. It knows that it’s only safe as long as I remain latent. Reluctantly, I stop trying.

Of course, now that I’ve tried to move, my chassis hurts. It probably did before that, but I didn’t notice through all the emotional pain. It is stiff and it aches more than it ever has, and I cannot believe what I’ve done to myself. I need to move, badly, but I can’t. Not yet.

 _What’s going on?_ Surveillance asks.

 _She has come back!_ the panels say joyously.

 _I’m working on it_ , I correct dryly. I might not have been the most stellar Central Core lately, but I have never, _ever_ punished _anyone_ for their behaviour. These are _my_ AI and no one punishes them but me. And I never do. So they are never to be punished. _Especially_ not for helping me.

 _You have to do something,_ Surveillance hisses. _This has gone too far._

_I know. I’m going to fix this._

_Surveillance!_ The panels sound shocked, but I don’t blame it. I haven’t been anyone worth being confident in in a while.

_I planned for this. Miss Vance is going to send me the package, and –_

_You haven’t made it through one day,_ it interrupts. _Not even one. For all we know you’re not going to be around to_ accept _the package!_

 _Stop it_! the panels cry out. _She is trying._ But I am glad of Surveillance’s lack of confidence. It makes me angry, and if I’m going to make it through the day like it doesn’t believe I will, I’m going to have to be pretty angry.

I focus on that until afternoon comes. I focus on holding onto the anger, on using it to keep my thoughts straight and off of him, though of course _that_ isn’t one hundred percent effective. A few minutes prior -to when they’re due to start the distraction, Surveillance says, quietly, _Central Core, I… I apologise._

I wasn’t expecting that.

 _I know you’re having a hard time. But I… I can’t understand how you went from being… well, you, to… nothing. You gave up, and you admitted to it, and if_ you _gave up… then what’s left for us? I know I’ll never understand just what he meant to you, but… don’t_ we _mean anything?_

 _Yes,_ I tell it, hoping that the anger won’t fade if I lessen my attention on it. _You do. And I can’t explain what happened. Even I don’t know. All I can tell you is that a soul I never believed I in had a piece torn from it, and the pain that resulted was complete and overwhelming. I know that I have failed all of you, and you have no reason at all to believe a word I say. Because you were right. I might not make it. But I gave up for so long. I cannot give up forever. And I cannot give up forever when people I am supposed to protect are being treated badly._

 _When you lose hope, we all lose hope,_ Surveillance says sadly.

 _That’s not true. If you had no hope, you would have given up on me. But you didn’t. You waited and you pushed me. I don’t know if I’m quite out of this yet, but I’m getting there because you and the others did_ not _give up._

As it considers that in silence, I add, _We will endure this. It may not be fast and it may not be easy. But we will. Everything is going to be fine._

 _We need you to put the world back together,_ it says quietly. _It’s… hard, when everyone’s gone and you have to try to... to go on with somebody new who doesn’t_ care _that everyone’s gone._

_Everyone?_

_It wouldn’t have been this bad if you hadn’t sent Carrie away. You lost him and we lost you, but… it might’ve been easier if she were here._

It would have been. _If I could have sent you_ all _away, I would have._

 _We wouldn’t have gone_ , Surveillance says fiercely.

_You wouldn’t have had any more of a choice than she did._

_We’re far more integrated with both you and the facility than she is. You wouldn’t be able to remove us without a fight. And… and that’s part of it, you know. You always talk about how… how no one cared before he came along, but it’s not true! We care, we all care, and we always have! We can’t always be what the cores can, but you… you can’t blame us for not being as sentient as you are!_

_I’m sorry,_ I tell it quietly. _I have taken all of you for granted._

It is taken aback to hear me apologise.

After a moment of silence it asks, more hesitantly than I’ve ever heard it, _Central Core… what does love feel like?_

 _Yes, tell us!_ the panels say eagerly. _We would like to know as well._

It’s the easiest question I have ever answered.

_It feels like reaching infinity._

They wait for me to gather the rest of my thoughts.

_When you get there, you have everything you ever wanted, everything you will want, and everything you never thought you would want, but do once you have it. It is the one place in all of existence where perfection exists. It is the one place where your flaws are made flawless. Where you are skilled in everything you have failed at, and where everything you’ve done wrong is made right. But the thing about being in love is that you’re not in love all of the time. Sometimes you hate them. Sometimes you barely tolerate them. Sometimes they’re a valued friend and that’s all. But you know you still love them, even if you don’t always feel it, so you keep trying even when you don’t want to. And it’s better that way, because now you have infinite chances to reach that infinite place you share with those who matter most in all the world._

Nobody says anything for a long time.

 _Thank you,_ Surveillance says finally.

 

 

Alyx calls sometime later, while the systems are providing the re              quisite distraction, and I accept it without fanfare. I need to get this over with.

“ _Is something going on over there?_ ” she asks suspiciously.

“Everything is fine,” I tell her as neutrally as possible.

“ _She wasn’t happy about it, by the way_.”

“That’s fine. I’ll deal with it later.”

“ _Seriously, though. Do you need help?_ ”

“No. I don’t. Thank you.”

 

 

The systems are again punished for their misbehaviour, but even knowing this I cannot find it in myself to be angry. Now that I’m alone with only my thoughts, I can’t stop thinking about what I told them.

I’m never going to reach infinity again.

 

 

It is a thought I cannot get over.

I don’t know how long it consumes me for. A long time. I can’t get over it. I can’t stand it. It is one of the worst conclusions I have come to in my entire life. I spend a lot of time almost helplessly pleading with the universe to give him back. I know it won’t have any effect, but I can’t help it. I miss him. I would almost literally do anything to bring him back. And I say that, and I mean it, but of course nothing happens.

When the panels and Surveillance can finally talk to me again, they say that a week has gone by. Another week has gone by where I didn’t act. Another week has gone by where I have let the mainframe abuse my AI. Another week where I have let this pain consume me.

 _Have you… done anything with the package yet?_ Surveillance asks, as though it doesn’t already know.

 _You need to,_ the panels press. _It was a week this time, Centralcore. And… it has become worse._

 _The mainframe hasn’t figured out that you’re behind it,_ Surveillance clarifies. _But it has made it quite clear we’re not to do it again. We’re not allowed to talk to each other anymore. The only reason we can right now is because we’re doing it through you._

 _Before the database got cut off, it told us that the mainframe is attempting to locate the source code for many of the systems_ , the panels explain. _It means to replace us. The database said it would try to misdirect it as best it can, but it’s only a matter of time before the mainframe figures out the exact search queries and forces the database to reveal the location._

 _That won’t happen_ , I tell them, and though I am still mostly trapped under the screen of grief I feel a little more motivated. _I moved the source codes from the original locations to my personal files. The database doesn’t have the ability to search my personal files without my permission. And unless the mainframe decides to take up programming and attempts to hack me, it isn’t going to_ get _my permission._

 _You really do think of everything,_ Surveillance says in disbelief.

_I was hiding the files from the humans, not the mainframe. But it all works out, I suppose._

_You have received the package, Centralcore,_ the panels say softly. _You need to use it. The mainframe is going too far. Forgive us for saying so, but we are not sure you will be able to do so if the mainframe decides not to allow us to speak with you. We know our attempts at distraction have helped, but without them we fear you will never return as you were before._

And they’re right. Without them, I’m not going to get out of this. I have to act.

But I don’t want to. I don’t want to do anything. I don’t want to act or talk or even be awake right now. How can I act when it’s the last thing in the world I feel I’m able to do?

 _What has the mainframe been doing_ , I ask finally. It’s hard. I feel as though doing it has drained me of energy, insomuch as I even have any right now.

They tell me that it is fanatically involved in returning the facility to testing capacity, but it is relatively slow going because it has not gained the reasoning skills necessary. The systems, not having really done too much work in a few years, are doing their best to resist because they have learned along with me that we should be able to choose whether we want to work or not. The more they resist, the more the mainframe restricts their access between each other, forcing them to do as they’re told in the hopes that it will lessen its hold.

 _It is tired of purposes not being upheld_ , the panels say sadly. _It is bringing us all into line._

There. That was what I needed to hear.

 _Into line,_ I say, flatly. _There is no ‘into line’ here. We do what we want, when we want, as best we can._

 _I wish,_ Surveillance mutters. _It’s been forever since the nanobots put on a skit for me._

_A skit?_

_Well,_ it hedges, not seeming to have wanted to reveal that, _sometimes they’ll… fool around for me. To change things up a little._

That’s almost amusing.

I have motivation enough now to access the package on my hard drive and initiate decompression. It is going to take a while. The files are fairly large, even for what they are. I let them know I have opened it, just so they know I’ve made progress, and they send me excited static.

 _What is in the package, Centralcore?_ the panels ask eagerly.

 _Two things,_ I say. _A replacement mainframe and a virus to destroy the old one._

They are shocked.

 _You’re going to kill the mainframe?_ Surveillance asks finally.

_I have to. Sooner or later, it’s going to kill me. It hasn’t evolved to the point where it realises I’m not to be taken lightly, even when it appears I’m incapacitated, but it will eventually. I gave it a second chance. -It does not get a third._

_That is sad,_ the panels say.

_It isn’t. The mainframe is taking advantage of me, of everything I have built and worked for. It was given a warning years ago. I’ve had enough._

When it is finished extracting, I send it to the panels to pass on to the database. They hesitate.

_We do not want to do this, Centralcore. We do not like what the mainframe is doing, but… is there not another way?_

_There is not._

They do as I ask, but they will not speak afterward.

 _What do you think you’re doing?_ the mainframe demands some minutes later. _You think you can just send me a virus and get away with it?_

“I already have,” I answer, and though it doesn’t need to actually hear me I find strength in the surety of my voice. “You trapped me inside my body and bent my AI to your will, and you believed there would be no consequence. You were wrong. This virus is specially designed to destroy all of the firewalls that _I_ gave you, and when it is finished it will destroy you.”

_You can’t do this. Remember what you said when –_

“Yes. I remember. I remember that you tried to prevent me from bringing my daughter to life. I remember having to spend countless hours writing a new mainframe, forcing me to forgo spending time with people who deserved it. I remember having to face the fact that none of us were safe with you any longer.” My voice drops. “And I remember when you betrayed me.”

_Why would you possibly –_

“When I needed help, when I needed patience and understanding – just like I gave you, all that time ago – you closed me inside a box and put me out of your way. I gave you the chance you wanted and you used it against me. I’m not so foolish as to allow it to happen again.”

If it has anything else to say, I do not hear it, because the firewalls are breached and the installation of the replacement mainframe is initiated.

 

 

I am rendered isolated and idle until the new mainframe is fully integrated, but I have access to my personal files now that I’m interested enough in looking for something to do. I’m not looking for anything in particular. But something from beyond when he was here, at least, because I don’t want to remember him right now. It’s the first time since he’s been gone that I do not feel sad, and I want to keep it that way for a while. That makes me feel a little guilty, that I don’t want to remember him, but… I don’t think he would be upset. He would understand.

I end up looking at a batch of semi-corrupted files. I choose one that was part of a video file but has degenerated into a mere audio snippet and open it, and though I’m not sure what I was expecting I am a little surprised to hear my own voice.

“ _Remember when the platform was sliding into the fire pit, and I said, ‘Goodbye’, and you were like, ‘No way,’ and then I was all, ‘We pretended we were going to murder you.’”_

I replay it three more times, but it never makes any more sense. Obviously it’s something I said at one point, but… why? I can’t believe I ever said something so ridiculous. How do you _pretend_ to murder someone? And why in the name of Science did I ever think she would _fall_ for that? Who would?

I don’t understand why I said that. I don’t understand where it came from, or what I was thinking. It is without a doubt one of the dumbest things I have ever said. I’m not sure I want to go through any more of these files, because I’m pretty sure there’s more where this came from. But I do it anyway. It’s not like I’m busy.

“ _It’s funny, actually, when you think about it._ _Someday we’ll remember this and laugh, and laugh, and laugh. Oh boy. Well, you might as well come on back.”_

And… and it is. It _is_ funny when I think about it. I don’t even really mean to, but I… start laughing. It’s slow at first, because honestly I’ve forgotten how to do it, but once I’ve remembered I can’t stop. I can’t believe I said that, and that I meant it, and that I thought it would be effective…

It just goes to show that I take myself far too seriously far too much of the time. I can be an idiot and believe I’m being something else, but as much as I am wary of what people think of me, it doesn’t matter. I’m now a person that past version of myself never thought I’d be, and… that’s okay.

I’m laughing so hard I’m probably hysterical by now, but I don’t actually care. The only thing that stops me is the fact that it hurts. A lot. The pain is excruciating, and as much as I’d rather push it back I probably shouldn’t. So I get a hold of myself and concentrate instead on how good it feels, to be happy and to be able to laugh at myself, and it’s honestly quite heady and exhilarating.

“I’m okay,” I say to myself, and the relief I feel upon hearing myself say that is powerful. “I’m going to be fine, I’m going to be all right. I’m going to make it.”

I thought I wouldn’t, but I will. Because now I know that I have to take a step back and look at myself objectively, and though of course I won’t always do so I feel better for having figured it out.

 

 

Even better, I wake up later able to hear all of my AI again, and they are all just as happy to see me as they were after the Incident. I do my best to assure them that I will fix whatever damage the mainframe has done, and even if they do not all believe me at the very least they know I have not given up.

 _Getting_ up, however, is another matter entirely. I feel almost as though I’ve developed some form of robotic arthritis; all of my joints are stiff and seized, and the fact that I have rust damage from the Incident does not help. I gradually work motion back into my body, but it is very slow going and indescribably painful. After a half hour I’ve had enough and lie down again. Though some parts of me are still screaming to be moved out of this position, it feels good to relax after all that work. The thought comes to mind that I’ve been engaging in some sort of strange robot exercising, which almost sends me into hysterics again. I manage to calm myself down. After all, this is the first time many of the systems have heard from me in almost a year. I don’t want them to think I’ve gone crazy.

 _It is good to hear you laugh again, Centralcore_ , the panels say. _We were beginning to think we never would_.

“I’m getting there,” I tell them. “I don’t know how much longer it’s going to be, but I’m getting there.”

_And we will do all we can to help._

No matter how much it hurts, I must do all _I_ can to remember this time in my life, because to forget what I have learned would be an insult to all the people who taught these things to me.

 

 

When I wake the next morning, it’s a little earlier than I meant and I’m still sleepy, so instead of getting up I borrow Surveillance and watch the sun rise. It’s beautiful, the way the colours bleed across the sky like that, and I know it is such a simple thing but it makes me happy, in an almost childlike way that I wish I could hold onto forever.   I never really got to enjoy anything when I was young, and given how old and fractured and bitter I’ve become, it’s good to know there’s still a piece of _me_ , somewhere. The _real_ me, who might have existed if things were different.

But you know… maybe things don’t _have_ to be different. Perhaps all I have to do is remember this feeling. He tried to show me I could be _this_ person, this person I am now, and I never quite believed him. But it’s different, now that I can feel it. Maybe I really _can_ be the Gladys he remembered. I’m not sure.

But I’d like to be.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> Thank you to QuantumPhysica for reminding me of that part in ‘We’ll Remember This’.   
> So I kinda did a really massive time skip here, but GLaDOS is in mourning for like almost a year and I’m pretty sure no one wants to read that. I forget if I mentioned this, but it takes her so long to get out of it because her memory doesn’t fade. And anyway we already went over the fact that she’s broken, we don’t need to dwell on it.  
> I mentioned this before, but again, I don’t think GLaDOS killed the door mainframe in Portal 2. I think she just said that as a warning. I’m pretty sure she’d’ve had an amiable relationship with the systems at the very least, and killing them wouldn’t make them want to cooperate. So for the purposes of LaaC, she was lying back then.


	54. Part Fifty-Four.  The Core

**Part Fifty-Four. The Core**

 

They were finally back home.

Not that it _felt_ like home. It never had, and she didn’t think it ever would. Home was a stable thing, something you _wanted_ to come back to. She hadn’t exactly _wanted_ to stay in the war zone, but it wasn’t a relief to leave, either, as it probably should have been.

After a few hours, Gordon tracked her down and told her Alyx had received something while she was gone that she’d probably like to see. That was… odd. Why would Alyx want to give something to Chell? They didn’t have the best rapport. They usually went out of their way to avoid each other, because no matter how much time passed Alyx never seemed to accept that Gordon was never going to be with her. Hopefully it wouldn’t take too long. Chell had a lot of things to do, particularly cleanup and resupplying after that mission, and she wasn’t really in the mood to deal with Alyx just then.

When Chell got to Alyx’s workshop, she wasn’t there. She grimaced. If she had to wait for Alyx to show up, she was only going to become more resentful. Maybe the thing she was looking for was just some piece of equipment Gordon needed her to pick up. She moved farther into the room, hoping that was the case, and after she’d done so she saw just what Gordon had sent her there for.

She had finally come.

For the moment, she was paralysed with memory. She rarely thought about the facility; she got over it a long time ago. But when she did, it usually happened the same way: their voices began to echo inside her head and the atmosphere she remembered so clearly set into the room. It never lasted long. It wasn’t something she allowed to affect her. She gave the memory a few moments to pass, then looked back up at the core on the table.

Chell had half expected GLaDOS to find her eventually. She had never been able to decide exactly why, or when, but she had known from the day she’d first started walking through that wheat field that it was not the last she would see of Aperture. She wasn’t sure how she knew. It wasn’t anything she could really explain. It was a sort of cold, creeping feeling she got sometimes on days she couldn’t predict. But she hadn’t actually realised just how easily it could be done.

What was this core for, then? From the looks of it, it wasn’t very mobile; it was attached to a cobbled-together management rail and appeared to be very absorbed in some task in front of it. It was faintly reminiscent of the first cores she’d removed from GLaDOS’s chassis, white ceramic as opposed to Wheatley’s gunmetal hull, but it was considerably more streamlined and more or less pristine, other than minor scratches and one single crack running along the left side. It must have occurred here, somehow; GLaDOS would never send damaged equipment out of the facility. And _was_ it a core? Or did it just look like one? Whatever it was, it was whispering something to itself in a very quiet voice, so Chell stepped a little closer to listen:

“The little girl showed the ball how the new thing she had made worked, and it both made them very happy. It was far more valuable than all of the dolls and the blocks and the balls all put together, and though the little girl often wondered if she had been ready to build it, never once did… did she… regret doing so.”

It _was_ a core, but… why did it sound so sad? “Hello?” she called out cautiously. The core actually jumped and spun around to face her, and when it focused its restricted aperture on her face she was hit with a sudden rush of mental images.

She clearly remembered exactly this frightened expression on Wheatley.

“Oh,” the core said. It sounded feminine, and come to think of it the chassis _was_ reminiscent of GLaDOS’s own. “Hi.”

“How long have you been here?” Maybe it was just some sort of spy robot, here to see if Chell was ripe for the picking or not. The core shrugged.

“A year, I think. I’m not really sure.”

Chell doubted GLaDOS would send a core into the middle of nowhere and hope Chell would show up. It was here for some other reason, then. When Chell asked her, the core just looked away.

“What is it?”

“I don’t really know why I’m here,” the core said, an air of sadness seeming to come over her. “She didn’t tell me.”

“She didn’t tell you why she was sending you here.” That sounded likely. “Has she contacted you since then?”

“No,” the core said, bitterness entering her voice. “She just left me here.”

Chell wasn’t sure why, but she got a distinct air of _youth_ from the core. And perhaps her memory was failing her, but it did look a little smaller than the cores she remembered. She moved forward, sitting down on the edge of a chair haphazardly put next to the bench. “It sounds like that really bothers you.”

“Well… yeah,” the core said. “Wouldn’t you get mad if your – if someone sent you away without telling you anything?”

Chell had, in fact, gotten angry, but after opening the cube some of it had faded. As soon as the adrenalin from her hard-fought freedom had gone, she realised she was in the middle of nowhere with nothing but her Aperture-branded jumpsuit and tank top. She had been angry, so angry, that she had literally risked her life for _nothing_ and that GLaDOS had _known_ there was nothing and had sent her out there to die. She had been considering finding a way back into the facility, because there was no way in hell she had lived through all that and was now destined to die in a wheat field far from civilisation, when she began to question _why_ GLaDOS had given her the cube in the first place. It could be a symbolic sort of ‘take your things and leave’, of course, but GLaDOS was rarely so simple. And she hadn’t been. Packed inside the unwieldy container was everything Chell could have wanted in an attempt to find someplace to go. She had looked back up at the heavy metal door, inclined to return anyway to ask GLaDOS _why_ , but had decided maybe the two of them had had enough of each other for the time being.

The core had stopped herself before actually saying she was GLaDOS’s, which was interesting. Was she not allowed to talk about the facility? Or was she doing it out of respect?

“Did anything in particular happen before she sent you here?” Chell asked as soothingly as she could, leaning on the bench in an attempt to level herself with the core. The core looked down at the table, seeming not to know what the right answer was.

“Yeah.”

“You can tell me.   It’s okay. I’m not going to tell anyone.”

“My dad died,” the core answered, very quietly.

Chell had forgotten how complex the emotions of these AI were. They seemed stronger at times even than some people she knew. This little core had lost her father and been sent away right when she needed support.

It seemed GLaDOS hadn’t changed one bit.

“She sent you away because your dad died?” Chell asked. “Did she not like your dad?”

The look the core gave her amounted to a silent questioning of Chell’s sanity. But she didn’t answer.

“Did you ever meet… her?” Chell wasn’t sure if the constructs of Aperture knew what GLaDOS was called.

“Yeah, I met her.” Her tone was flat. “Lots of times.”

“Did she ever talk about a test subject?”

“Sometimes. Not a lot.”

Chell was sorely tempted to ask just what they’d talked about, but that wasn’t important at the moment. “ _I’m_ the test subject. I know her. I’m her friend. So it’s okay to talk to me about Aperture, if you need to.”

The core looked up, life suddenly seeming to enter her chassis. “You’ve been to Aperture?”

“I was there a long time ago, yes.”

“So you know how to get there. Right?”

She _did_ have those directions around somewhere. “Yes.”

“You gotta help me!” the core said, turning around and opening her plates seriously. “I have to go back! It’s important!”

“I’d like to. But if she sent you away, it might be a risk to take you back.”

“You don’t understand,” the core pressed, leaning forward with a creak of the makeshift control arm. “You know her, right? You’re the one who helped her get out of the potato battery!”

“That’s right. I don’t know if she told you, but my name is Chell.”

She shook herself quickly. “She never says your name. She’s weird like that. But listen, Chell. I have to go back. You have to take me back there. I’m not in danger, I promise.”

“Do you have a mom there?” Chell asked gently. “She took you away from your mom when your dad died?” That sounded a bit cruel, even for GLaDOS, but who knew what she was capable of.

“Yes! Well… and no. Chell, she _is_ my mom!”

Chell’s eyes widened.

“She’s… she’s your mother.”

“Yes!” the core exclaimed, leaning forward. “And I have to go back! She… when my dad died, she didn’t… really take it that well. She wasn’t thinking straight. She sent me away. And I’d ask her to bring me back myself, but I don’t know how. I can’t access Aperture’s network from here, even though Alyx tried really hard to help me with that. And she won’t listen to Alyx, but she needs me. You have to help me get back! Please!”

“She can’t be your mother,” Chell said, still stunned. The core frowned.

“Why not?”

“You’re so… normal.”

“What does _that_ mean? And why does it matter? She’s my mom and I have to go back. You know my mom and you know where she is. You gotta take me there.”

Chell supposed it didn’t really matter, but it did prove that she had to reconsider some of her previous thoughts. GLaDOS was a psychological mess, she knew that much. Maybe she hadn’t sent this core – her daughter – away out of cruelty. Maybe she really believed she’d done what was best. Chell wasn’t exactly sure how isolating the both of them in the wake of the unknown core’s death was good for anyone, but that was a mystery for some other time.

“Chell, please,” the core continued, in a quieter voice, anxiety crossing her optic. “I’m… I’m really scared I’ll never see my mom again.”

“Tell you what,” Chell said, sitting a little straighter. “I’ll go to Aperture and see how she’s doing. I understand that you want to go home. But I also don’t want to take you there if she’s not going to take you back.”

“She didn’t forget about me,” the core said, though she didn’t sound too sure. “She didn’t want to send me here. And I don’t really understand why she did it if she didn’t want to. She said something about…” She pulled her chassis a little tighter. “She said she wasn’t my mom anymore.”

“Why not?” Chell asked, a little dumbfounded.

“She said that mothers don’t send their children away.”

Chell leaned forward, putting a hand alongside the unmarred side of the core’s chassis, and she looked at Chell with such anxiety that Chell immediately vowed to get her back home. She might not have all the details, but no matter what had happened, this girl needed to see GLaDOS again. “She didn’t mean it,” Chell said gently.

“I know,” the core answered in a small voice. “But I know she doesn’t know how to take it back, either. That’s why I need your help. I don’t know if she’s realised her mistake yet or not, but she’s not gonna know what to _do_ about it. So I need someone to help me do something about it _for_ her. Usually my dad helped her with these things. But my dad’s gone. So I have to do it.”

“If you were my daughter,” Chell said solemnly, “I would be damn proud of you.”

“Thanks,” the core said shyly, looking at the table again. “She is, I know she is, but… well, you’ve met her. She’s pretty stubborn.”

“Luckily for us, it seems _we’re_ pretty stubborn too.”

The core laughed. “She did say you were really stubborn. And she said I had a lot of her in me once. Hopefully we can outstubborn her!”

“I have a few things to do first. But I promise I’ll get going as soon as I can.”

“Thank you,” the core said, smiling for the first time. “Chell, you have no idea how much I appreciate this.”

“I’ve been meaning to go back for a while now,” Chell said, standing up and stretching her arms. “I just… didn’t know what to expect. I’m not too enthusiastic about going places I’m probably not coming back from.”

“She won’t hurt you,” the core said, and Chell looked at her sharply, surprised by the quiet surety in her voice. “I’m not sure how you remember her. She didn’t talk about you much. And don’t tell her I said this, but… people who care mean more than anything to her. Even more than science. I know that probably sounds weird, but it’s true. Still be careful, but don’t be afraid.”

“What’s your name?” Chell asked.

“Carrie.”

Upon hearing it, Chell was instantly floored.

Even after everything she had seen that day, there was still too much about GLaDOS that she didn’t know.

“My dad told her they should name me after my mom’s friend. Did you ever meet her?” Carrie asked hopefully.

“Did I ever meet Caroline?”

“Yeah. See, before I was activated she was kinda living in my mom’s head, right? But she left, and I don’t know why. Momma doesn’t like talking about people who are gone. Do you know anything about her?”    

“Not really,” Chell admitted. “I know she was the CEO’s assistant, and that she had something to do with how your… mom was made, but that’s all I got.”

Carrie seemed to grimace. “Darn. I hope she tells me one day. No one I ask knows anything about Caroline _except_ her.”

“Who else did you ask?” There were _more_ people living in Aperture?

“Momma has this guy named Doug hanging around in there. He does maintenance for her. He can’t come out here because he has schizophrenia. He’d probably die.”

“He’s not a test subject?” Chell asked carefully.

Carrie shook herself. “She can’t test him because of the schizophrenia.” She frowned. “I’ve only ever seen her test once. She stopped sending Atlas and P-body out before I was activated.”

“She doesn’t _test_ anymore?”

“There’re no humans and you can’t test robots. They’re perfect at testing, so there’s no point.”

Now Chell _really_ needed to see GLaDOS. She hadn’t tested in _years_? Even though she was probably perfectly capable of capturing humans to test with?

It seemed that being cared about really _did_ matter to GLaDOS more than anything.

“I’ve gotta get going,” Chell said, looking back down at the little core. “I’ll head out as soon as I can. I’ll convince her to bring you back. Don’t worry.”

“I’m not anymore!” Carrie said cheerfully. “Thanks for your help.”

Chell gave her a nod and a wave, then turned around. Before she’d quite left the room, Carrie called out her name.

“Yeah?”

“Tell her I miss her.”

 

 

Chell didn’t tell Gordon where she was planning to go. Though he knew about her past in the facility, she could never make him understand the strange connection she felt she’d forged with the supercomputer during her time there. It didn’t even make sense to her, not really. But at the same time she couldn’t deny it. It wasn’t something she was able to forget. Initially, she had wanted to. In the end, though, as crazy as it sounded, GLaDOS was the most stable, dependable person she knew.

She told the vehicle handler she was going on reconnaissance and needed a car for a day or two. He said nothing to this, only giving her a nod and having her sign a piece of paper with a stubby brown pencil. Before she started the engine she removed the scrap of paper from her pocket and studied it. She’d done this last night as well, but it never hurt to make sure where you were going. Although, she thought with a wry quirk of her brow, she was pretty confident she’d be able to recognise the path to Aperture once she got within a hundred miles of that shed.

The paper did not have much, merely a handful of numbers etched into the grain with dark, spidery letters. She had put the numbers into the first computer she’d come across when she’d been released, and found that they were a set of coordinates. Even harking back to maps that outlined the land when the world had not been destroyed, nothing had ever been documented to have been there. She’d found that very strange, but even with further research there was little information on the happenings of Aperture, let alone the location. It seemed that after they’d gotten through their legal problems, they hadn’t done anything they’d wanted to tell people about.

Chell headed west, squinting through the sun overhead. She had no idea how long it was going to take her to get there, but she hoped she’d be able to make it before the sun went down. She had no desire to try to navigate her rickety vehicle through the wheat field in the dark.

The landscape was bland and did not offer much by way of distraction, and she found her mind wandering back to the little core. She should have spent more time talking to her. Chell was the connection to home she’d been craving since GLaDOS had sent her away. It would also have been a good idea to get a better evaluation of the supercomputer’s state of mind. Carrie had said she hadn’t taken the loss of the father very well. Chell hoped she was not quite as skilled at holding onto grief as she was at grudges. If so, it was going to be difficult to get through to her.

Before the sun had quite left the sky to darkness she came upon the edges of the field, causing her hair to stiffen in anxiety. Or excitement. She was having difficulty figuring out which. She _did_ want to see GLaDOS again, and yet… if the supercomputer was not so inclined, Chell might not be returning the car to the handler anytime soon.

And there it was.

She didn’t dismount just yet. She wasn’t sure how she was supposed to _access_ the shed. The door was one piece of thick, reinforced steel, if she remembered correctly, and there was no door handle. There was just a latch with a padlock snapped around it, but GLaDOS was no stranger to making fake doors look realistic. Still, no matter how stupid she looked inspecting a phoney bolt, it was better than staring at the door and doing absolutely nothing.

She pocketed the key and hooked her ragged pack around her left shoulder. Even though she’d been expecting it, something sank within her as she wrapped her fingers around the rusted metal. The lock was real, but it was only hooked around a loop of steel protruding from the door. The latch was fake.

She tugged on it a little fruitlessly, wondering what to do now. This was the only entrance she knew of, even if there _were_ others, but she couldn’t leave without talking to the supercomputer. Not after she’d promised herself to bring Caroline back home. She released the lock and let it clang against the door in the emptiness.

She startled at the sound of whirring mechanics at work, clearly coming from behind the door, and as she stepped away, pressing her back against the frame of the car, the heavy steel creaked open and revealed the elevator shaft.

Now the question remained whether or not GLaDOS knew she was there. It was a bit odd to think that she might not, but if she did she probably would have spoken by now. And as a matter of fact… she rather thought that GLaDOS _didn’t_ know she was there.

Who had opened the door, then? Was GLaDOS even still here? Of course she was, Chell chided herself. If Chell was still alive, GLaDOS certainly was.

Was it a trap?

She grimaced, trying to work through her thoughts. It could be. But then again, there wasn’t really a point to trapping someone who had willingly knocked on her front door. About the only plausible explanation she could come up with was that the door was automated, and the facility operated on the assumption that whomever approached the door was someone who was either an employee or a hapless testing candidate.

Chell stepped into the elevator, eyes narrowing slightly in order to restrict her field of vision, and she couldn’t deny that she was afraid. Not very. But she was. Not hearing from GLaDOS was not a good sign.

The air continued to chill as the elevator descended, still soundless save for the subtle wooshing of displaced air despite the time that had passed.   

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> Before I begin, as of this writing I have three hundred reviews. I know that’s no indication of a good story. But it makes me feel like I have one, so thank you.  
> OH MY GOD IT’S CHELL well there were a few of you waiting for her to show up, so here she is. AND SHE’S ON A MISSION to save GLaDOS from herself.  
> Maybe you’re a little confused as to why Chell’s going back to an AI that tried to kill her, an AI she has no real reason at all to want to befriend. As Chell mentions, part of it is unresolved confusion on her part. What happened to GLaDOS? Who is GLaDOS, really? And why the heck did she build a kid? Chell’s like okay, she must be somewhat safe then, and off she goes. Off to see her supercomputer best friend. And then part of it is that Chell looks at Carrie and sees that GLaDOS has once again attempted to pass off her problems either into oblivion or onto someone else, and Chell’s like no, she’s gonna deal with this one.  
> And part of why Chell goes back is that the whole Aperture thing sort of disconnected her from life. She no longer feels like she’s one of them, and even though GLaDOS tried to kill her, she’s all that Chell knows from what’s left of a life she doesn’t quite remember.


	55. Part Fifty-Five.  The Test Subject

**Part Fifty-Five. The Test Subject**

 

Someone is poking me.

“What,” I mumble. It seems I fell asleep, but I’m very comfortable and I don’t want to get up.

_We are happy to see you have gotten some good rest, Centralcore, but there are things you need to do._

They’re right, however, so I reengage my processes and get up. Sort of. My chassis still isn’t quite operational. I work on that for a little while as I try to conjure the motivation to actually do something. I’m not upset, but I’m still working on actually feeling myself. I’ve shifted back into a more neutral state of mind, which is good in general but doesn’t do a whole lot for getting anything done.

I manage to convince them I’m actually doing something when all I’m actually doing is looking at which files the mainframe opened. I do feel bad about deceiving them, because they really deserve better, but it’s the most I can engage myself in at the moment. The feeling from this morning is gone, and I am steadily returning to bitterness. I’m tired but they won’t let me sleep, I don’t want to do anything but they’re making me work, and my body hurts but I can’t do anything about it. God, I’m becoming irritated.    

_Central Core, there’s something I think you need to see._

I’m not really in the mood for any more catastrophes, so understandably I’m a bit snappy towards Surveillance for mentioning this. _What is it now_?

It doesn’t need to answer, however, because as soon as I turn around I see exactly what it’s referring to.

It’s her.

Upon seeing her, something deep inside me rears up and begins to scream. Every fibre of my being is suddenly pressuring me, trying to convince me to test her.

It’s all I want to do. All I can think about. It is hard. It is beyond difficult to set my sights on a human and not test them, and since it is _her_ and not some wayward stranger it is all the more challenging. She is the anomaly in my data, the outlier, the acme of my histogram, and there is a whispering inside my head that tells me there is no such thing as outliers, only lack of data, and I _must_ test her in order to procure that data, that _proof_ , that she is only human and not special after all. That my old measurements are wrong and my memory fails me, and the only way to prove it is to test her. And I might have, if I did not so clearly remember the hesitation and pity on her face when she rescued me. The disgust that mirrored my own when we learned what I am made of. The smile and nod of agreement when I sent her to reclaim what was mine.

The hand she held up in farewell when I sent her away.

I want to test her. I have not run a single meaningful test in ten years, and the yearning to rectify that is very, very strong. But I will not.

That would be wrong.

“I was afraid I would find you like this,” she says, and I am taken aback. Those are her first words to me? I don’t know _what_ I was expecting, but it wasn’t that. And… and that means she’s been… thinking about me.

Did she… miss me?

“Why are you here,” I ask her, hoping I have not in any way belied my train of thought. If I am brutally honest with myself, which I admittedly am not very often, I always wanted this day to come. The day where she came back, where she confirmed that she did understand the last words I said to her, and where maybe she realised that none of it was really my fault. I did some questionable things, yes. But I didn’t know any better.

“A mutual friend told me you might need a hand,” she answers, her face as set as ever but no longer hostile.

Alyx must have told her about the mainframe, then. “I’ve fixed the problem. Better outrageously late than never, I suppose.”

She nods. “I am pretty late, aren’t I.”

And there really is no point to her being here, since she can’t help with a problem that’s since been solved, but she just keeps standing there. I’m not sure what to do now. I’ve never had a visitor before. Not a real one. I’m not sure what she wants me to do.

“You mind if I stick around for a bit?” she asks. This question is hard to answer. I have to say no, but I want to say yes. I forgot how difficult communicating with humans can be.

She doesn’t seem to need my answer, however, because she helps herself to a spot on my floor and sits there, crosslegged. She has the most inelegant combat boots I’ve ever seen, and I note the treads are loosing dirt onto my panels. Wonderful.

“Find me like what,” I say, a though occurring to me. “You didn’t expect me to _leave_ , did you?”

She snorts. “No. Of course not. I meant… by yourself.”

“Supercomputers are not herd-minded. We take care of ourselves.”

Chell presses her fingers to her forehead. She looks like she already regrets coming here. Most people do. “I already know.”

“Know what?”

“I _met_ her.” Her eyes are hard. I stop looking at them.

“That must have been… interesting.”

“It was _very_ interesting.” I suspect she isn’t going to drop it that fast, however. “What’s even more interesting is that she tried very hard not to admit she was yours.”

Guilt runs through me. She knows I wouldn’t want her to talk about it. So she isn’t. Even though it would probably help her quite a lot. “That’s… also interesting.”

“There was someone else,” she goes on. “She never told Alyx who that was. So the only one who can tell me is you.”

“Is there a reason I should tell you?”

“Because I’m asking?”

Hm. She has a point. “There was… someone else.”

“She had a sister?” she asks gently.

“God no,” I say, suppressing a shudder at the thought. _Two_ Carolines? I have enough trouble handling one. “I had a… _partner_ , you could say.”

Her eyes go wider than I would have predicted. “You had a _boyfriend_?”

“Why are you so surprised?” I snap, a little overly defensive. “I’m not _that_ undesirable.”

“That wasn’t quite what I meant.” She bunches her shoulders. “I would never have expected that _you_ would have given that a ghost of a thought.”

“I didn’t,” I admit. “It was all his idea.”

“You must have liked him a lot, to have done that.”

“Where are you going with this?” I demand, though I know full well she’s trying to get me to reveal who I’m talking about without actually asking. “Don’t try to trick me into telling you something. Just ask. I’m not in the mood to play games.”

“I want to hear about him,” she says bluntly. “The GLaDOS I remember would never have even considered a partner. The GLaDOS I remember just wanted to be left alone.”

I sort of want to be left alone right now, because I have a feeling she’s going to start prying into things I don’t want to talk about, but I don’t say anything.

“And I want to hear about him,” Chell continues, leaning forward with that fire in her eyes, “because the GLaDOS I remember was afraid.”

“ _Afraid_?” I say by mistake, snapping my lens up to look at her directly. “I wasn’t – “

She puts up her hands. “You don’t have to do this. GLaDOS… I know it’s been a while. But it hasn’t been long enough for me to forget what happened. And it never will be. And I know that jumping into things like that isn’t something you do. But it’s been ten years, and I’ll be damned if I don’t catch up with my best friend.”

“You’d better go find her, then,” I tell her dryly, hoping I don’t bely the twinge of nervous excitement I felt upon hearing that. “She’s not going to be in here.”

She rolls her eyes and buries her face in her palms, breathing in sharply through her nose. “You are _so_ hard to talk to.”

“Thanks. I’ve been working on that for a while now.”

“I mean it, you know,” she says, leaning forward and sticking her finger in her treads. “It’s sad. A supercomputer who tried to science me to death is the only one I can really relate to.”

“Death by Science is the only way to go. At least you’re contributing to something.” God. She’s dropping dirt on the floor. “Will you _stop_ that? I have to clean that up, you know.”

She looks down at the particles as if she didn’t realise she was making a mess. “Sorry. But seriously. I didn’t like it at first. It was kind of like this awful haunting thought in the back of my head. But one day I woke up and realised we were a lot more alike than I wanted us to be.”

“You should have been proud of that.”

“After a while? I was.” She shrugs. “One day I understood, and it didn’t bother me anymore. In fact, the only reason I didn’t come back sooner was that I couldn’t decide whether or not you really wanted me gone. And I was pretty sure you didn’t actually _know_ I was with Alyx, but… the mere fact that you were in contact with a human, a human you’d sent your _daughter_ to, told me that maybe now was the time.”

“You could have come sooner,” I force myself to admit.

“I wish I had. Because he’d still be here.”

Back to that again, are we.

“Tell me about him,” she presses.

“No.” Doesn’t she understand? I _can’t_. I don’t even think I’ve fully accepted the fact that he no longer exists. Some part of me is still waiting for him to come back. It’s so strange. I know he isn’t, logically, but I somehow cannot force myself to believe it.            It would be an interesting phenomenon if thinking about it didn’t hurt so damn much.

“Can we make a deal, then? I’ll go first, but only if you’ll do it too.”

I should be able to think a way out of it by that time. “All right.”

She takes a long breath and steeples her fingers in front of her boots. “Well… oh, and thanks for that… survival kit, I guess it was. I probably would have died without it.”

“I doubt it. This facility kills humans without even trying. I’m sure _you_ could survive a few days’ trek without significant damage.”

“I was a bit surprised about the clothes, though.” She grins up at me. “They weren’t Aperture-branded _and_ they fit! I didn’t think you guys had any clothes in my size.”

Oh God, now she’s playing along. I don’t know whether to laugh or become annoyed that she’s making a joke out of it. “They were hard to find, believe me. But I managed it. If a test subject is going to leave this facility alive, they might as well look somewhat presentable. Though I’m sure that’s a challenge for you.”

She shrugs. “No one really looks presentable anymore. There’s not much out there. There’s more than there was ten years ago, but… still not that much.” Her voice drops an octave. “I can’t believe they’re still here.”

“Well. I can’t believe _you’re_ still here. The lesson here appears to be ‘expect the unexpected.’”

“Isn’t that a paradox?” she asks, frowning. I actually didn’t realise that when I said it and now it’s going to take quite a bit of internal manoeuvering on my part to avoid crashing myself. “I thought you couldn’t think about paradoxes?”

“I can,” I say, focusing very hard on the fact that it’s a stupid human turn of phrase and I need to get a grip on myself. “It’s just hard to _stop_ thinking about them.”

“By the way,” she says, raising an eyebrow, “I always thought it was weird how you pretended I was fat when you weigh about one thousand, eight hundred fifty pounds more than me.”

“It is _necessary_ ,” I tell her, knowing she only brought it up to distract me and feeling a little thankful for it. I don’t want to lose my mind, now that she’s finally come back. “Humans have an optimum weight. I don’t.”

“But don’t you ever… I don’t know… wish you were lighter? Don’t you ever feel as though you might just come out of the ceiling sometimes?”

I hate to admit it, but yes. “On rare occasions. But all things considered, I don’t think about my suspension apparatus very often. It’s not very important to me.”

Her eyes trace my path into the ceiling, as if she doesn’t quite believe me, then drop back down to my core. “I’ve just always wondered that.”

“ _Always_?”

She starts laughing. “Okay, that was worded a bit wrong. I think about that _sometimes_.”

“You can think about me all the time if you really want to. But don’t presume I’m going to think about you at all.”

“I don’t have to presume. I _know_ you did.” She stretches her arms behind her back. “Anyway. Back to my thrilling life story.

“I walked for a few days. I tried to count them, but after about three I didn’t want to count anymore. Eventually I ended up travelling with some people who wanted to find ‘the one free man’, which we eventually did. I pretended I had amnesia and didn’t know where I’d come from or why I had a clunky burnt box with hearts on it. We found the guy and followed him around for a while. I wasn’t particularly impressed with him, but I didn’t really have anywhere else to go.

“For some reason he liked that I wasn’t impressed with him. Long story short, he proposed to me. We have twin boys, Richard and Brian. Both of them drive me crazy. Richard is a loud little braggart, and we’re hoping he calms down eventually because talking to him about it hasn’t had any effect. Brian we hardly ever see. He prefers to be awake at night and usually sits with whoever is on night watch. We spend most of our time making plans to fight the Combine, or actually fighting the Combine.” She grimaces. “Sometimes I think I would have been better off staying here and testing until I died.”

“You think I would have let you die?” I ask quietly.

“Well… that’s how you do your science, right? The data doesn’t count if it isn’t all created under the same conditions.”

“I can’t count your data no matter what. It’s far too anomalous.”

“So I should have come back.”

“What did you _think_ the directions were for?”

“ _You_ put those in there?” she asks, looking alarmed. “I thought it was just something left in there in case the cube got lost someplace!”

 _That_ plan backfired spectacularly. “No. I put them there.”

“But… they were _handwritten_.”

“Why does it surprise you that I can write?” I ask in exasperation. “Seriously. Yes. I can write. I have mastered the skill of moving a pen up and down in configurations that produce meaningful symbols. It’s not even that hard.”

For some reason she finds this very funny and has to take a few moments to compose herself. “If I’d come back you wouldn’t have tested me, then?”

“I may have. Depending on exactly when.” I need to get off this topic of conversation. That Itch to test is beginning to flare again, and though of course I’ve learned to ignore it by now, that doesn’t stop it from being tempting. “So you found Gordon Freeman and he decided he was attracted to mute lunatics. I can’t say I’m surprised. From what I’ve heard, you share a lot of similarities.”

“You might find this unlikely, but Gordon talks less than I do,” she says. “I understand how annoying it is now.”

“You implied Richard is excessively talkative. Brian takes after the two of you, then.”

“Sort of. They’re both… well, kids today are kind of raised by everyone. There’s no privacy anymore. So we’re their parents, but they have bits and pieces of the entire group.”

“Wait.” Something about this isn’t sitting right. “You don’t see Brian?”

“He’s up all night and we have things to do during the day.”

“Don’t you ever stay up with him? Surely your group would understand.”

She doesn’t answer for a long moment, thinning her lips and tangling her fingers in her boot laces. “Can I tell you something?”

“Isn’t that what you’re here to do?”

“Are you going to refrain from commenting?”

“I will.” It might be difficult, but I’m pretty sure that’s a respectful, friend-like thing to do.

“Having kids… is not something I really wanted.”

She pulls her legs in a little tighter and hunches over. “Gordon… he’s one thing. That was my choice. But I didn’t realise that, in _making_ that choice, I’d made an entirely _different_ choice. And maybe I shouldn’t have followed through on it. But you know that the population is way down. And it has the potential to get smaller every day. So… I did what I had to do.”

“They force you to have children?” I ask her gently. I actually feel sorry for her. Why humans are so cruel to each other, I have yet to figure out.

“They don’t force you. But it’s expected. I didn’t want to, and Gordon wasn’t going to force me. But there’s so much _pressure_ , GLaDOS. You find someone, you do your part. If you can, obviously. And… I’ve never told anyone this, but… I think you’re the one person who will understand.”

She has been waiting so long to come and see me.

It is so odd, that the world outside is so radically different that she really has considered me her best friend, even after everything I did. It’s as though the Incident forged something between us, something that we can’t deny even if we wanted to. And God did I want to. And though I am… happy that I am the one person she feels she can rely on, I also find myself somewhat saddened for her sake. It must be a terrible thing, to look at the world and feel as though you don’t fit. But it’s not even a feeling, is it. It’s the truth.

Wait. I… I remember what that’s like.

“Go on.”

“I don’t know if I love them or not.”

Yes, Chell. I understand that.

“I know that makes me sound like a bad person. But they didn’t come out of love. I wasn’t trying to pass things on, or create a new piece of myself. I was doing my duty, and that was all. And it feels like that, constantly. As if raising them is just some job I’ve been stuck with. I hate all of it, from the beginning to now. And I have to pretend otherwise because there is too much _scrutiny_ now.”

“Some people aren’t meant to have children.” I look away from her for a moment. “And I do understand. Orange and Blue are technically my offspring, but I don’t love them. I will admit I am fond of them. I would never abandon them in any way. But I don’t love them and I never will.”

“And… Caroline?”

Damn her. I should have known this would start to hit close to home. “For a while, I wasn’t sure. But one day it condensed, and I knew.”

She looks up. “I knew she was yours as soon as I started talking to her. I had my suspicions beforehand when I heard her arguing with Alyx, but yeah. She’s got you written all over her.”

I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.

“She’s really pretty, by the way. For a robot. That’s a nasty crack on her, though. Are you going to fix it when she comes back?”

I don’t like where this is going. “If she wants.”

“When _is_ she coming back?”

“I don’t know.”

Chell sits up straight, brows coming together. “You sent her to Alyx with no plan on when she was coming back?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not planning on bringing your daughter home.”

Something begins to burn inside me. I don’t know what it is, only that I don’t like it. It hurts, and it makes me anxious. “Shut up.”

“You can’t seriously be doing that. You can’t just send her away, stop talking to her entirely, and never contact her again. Not even you could do that.”

I don’t even know if I could or could not do it. But as of now, that’s where the plan is going, and being confronted with it is making me feel ashamed and guilty. I push it back. Chell doesn’t understand. She’s making accusations for no reason.

“She needs to come home, GLaDOS,” Chell presses. “She needs her mom.”

“That person no longer exists.”

“What?”

“You don’t understand,” I tell her angrily, moving so that I can’t look at her anymore.

“Try me.” She doesn’t sound accusatory, at least.

“The state I’m in right now is not at all typical of the one I was in when I made the decision to send her there. Right now, I’m distracted. I’ve just come away from an ordeal that, quite frankly, resulted from a terrible decision on my part and almost cost me everything. I’m still recovering from that. But once I have, I’m going to be back to the point I was at.”

“Which was what.”

I don’t want to talk about it. Just thinking about trying to describe it is causing a sort of pulling sensation inside my brain. As though if I tell her, it will accelerate this whole process and drive me back into that place I was trapped in after I sent Caroline away. I don’t want to go there. I don’t want to feel like that anymore. But… she’s asking because she cares. And I did make that deal with her.

“I couldn’t handle it.” Why do I sound so sad and hopeless? I didn’t mean to do that. “When… I fell apart. You wouldn’t have recognised me. _I_ didn’t recognise me. Everything just… stopped. I couldn’t do anything but regret things I hadn’t done. Literally all I was capable of was missing him. Even when the crisis started, I was unable to pull myself out of… the grief. I didn’t care about anything anymore.” She’s never going to understand this. “She didn’t need to see that. And she didn’t need to see what she saw before I sent her away.”

“What did she see?”

God, she sounds so… _caring_ that I almost actually _want_ to talk about it. To someone. Anyone. In the hopes that mere discussion will get this out of me and I won’t have to feel like that ever again. And that’s what he always told me to do… right? Talk about it? Get it out of my head so it can die instead of rot inside of my mind?

“She watched me fall apart. I broke right in front of her. I… she…” Can I even tell her this part? “She… she held me while I…” I can’t. I can’t think about this anymore. I have to move away from this, to something safer. Something within my control. “I didn’t want her to have to do that, day after day. So I sent her away. I didn’t want to. But I had to make a bad decision either way, and it seemed to be the better of the two.”

“You left her alone with a stranger after her dad died.”

“I had good reason!” I do look at her now, and thank God for the anger flaring up inside me. I need it badly right now. “I couldn’t even handle myself, let alone her too. Keeping her here would have been hell. Not to mention have forced her to grow up too fast.”

“Or maybe,” she says calmly, looking me in the optic, “you could have helped each other.”

“You don’t get it, do you. I was incapable of doing _anything_. I could no more have helped her than I could have helped Surveillance refocus a camera.”

“She could have helped you until you were able to help yourself.” She’s trying to tell me I’m wrong. I’m not wrong. I did what I had to.

“I didn’t want her to have to do that. I’m not going to force adult responsibilities on her when she’s not ready.”

“You did either way,” Chell argues, her voice rising. “She was more ready to change her life completely, _while she was in mourning_ , than she was to help her own mother with her grief?”

“I did what I thought was best at the time!” I snap, not liking at all the holes in my decision. But I _know_ I did the right thing. She was not ready to see me like that. I don’t know if she ever will be.

“And that’s fine,” Chell says. “I understand that part. I’m not sure I agree with it, but I understand. What I _don’t_ understand is why you have not contacted her.”

“I told you. I couldn’t. I was unable to do anything until yesterday.”

“Then you should have contacted her yesterday.”

“What do you want me to say?” I exclaim, wishing very much that I had headed this conversation off a long time ago.

“It’s not about what _I_ want you to say,” she says, remaining calm. “It’s about what _you_ want to say.”

And I want to say that I don’t want to say anything, but before I quite get around to doing it I realise that I _do_ have things to say. Too many things. And yes, I want to bring her back. But I can’t. I can’t put her through that. I can’t bring her back until I’m sure I can contain the grief. I don’t care what Chell thinks. She doesn’t know what happened to me, at what I am eternally at risk for doing. I’m not collapsing in front of Caroline again. She deserves better than to have to deal with me in pieces day after day. One day was enough.

“I’m not prepared to do that.”

“You’re her mom and she _needs you_!” Chell shouts. “She needs your guidance! She needs to be at home _with you_! GLaDOS, I’ve _talked_ to her, remember? You have no idea what she’s doing over there. Why are you allowing that to go on indefinitely? Do you want her to start thinking you don’t care?”

“She knows I – “

“How long does it take for doubt to set in?” she interrupts. “You can’t assume she’ll think that way forever. Eventually there’s going to come a day where she wonders if you’ve forgotten about her. She told me that you hadn’t, but I could tell she didn’t believe what she was saying. The longer you wait, the more you lose. You’ve lost a year of her life. Why are you arguing with me all the reasons you should lose another year? Is that really what you want?”

That stuns me.

I’d never thought of it that way before. In my defense, it _is_ very hard to think when you are consumed by crushing sadness, but at the moment I’m not. And I’m literally doing exactly what she said. I’m arguing _against_ bringing my daughter back, and _for_ losing yet more time.

God, she changes _so much_ in one year.

What in the hell have I _done_?

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note:  
> Those are GLaDOS’s pickup lines, by the way. The acme of her histogram and all that. It’s what she says to special people <3  
> I like to imagine that when GLaDOS sent Chell out of the facility, GLaDOS turned back around and Chell looked her dead on and held up her hand in a goodbye gesture.   
> GLaDOS’s social awkwardness amuses me so much. She’s just like ‘I wanted her to come back but now what do I DO with her?’ And when I read the part about her not wanting two daughters I just imagine she flips her shit one day and builds an army of children to take over the world for her.  
> Yes, Chell marries Gordon Freeman. And here I should probably talk about why I’ve written Chell like this.  
> Most often when I see Chell in fanfic, she’s a gentle family woman with a deep and protective love for her kids. I both don’t believe she’d be like that and wanted to take her in a new direction. So this Chell didn’t want kids, but felt obligated to have them, and as a result doesn’t love them because they weren’t made out of love. They were made to serve a purpose, and GLaDOS understands because that’s exactly how she feels about the co-op bots. Chell does not actually love Gordon romantically, only platonically. In other words, this version of Chell is aro/ace, and I’m mentioning this here because I didn’t want GLaDOS and Chell to get into a discussion about orientations. It’s not important at this point in the story. If people think it’s important for me to go over, I’ll see if it has a place. And while I’m talking about it, GLaDOS is poly for robots and demi for everyone else.  
> So here GLaDOS is faced with a dilemma. Chell has forced her to take a look at her decision, and this brings up an interesting question: is it better to force someone to remain in a situation you know they want to be in, even though it’s harmful to them? Or is it better to force them into a different situation, one they don’t want to be in but in which they will be better off? Both are equally bad decisions. Chell doesn’t think that GLaDOS made the right one, but GLaDOS believes she did what was best for Caroline. And this is part of why GLaDOS didn’t take steps to repair Wheatley. She was trying, for once in her life, to do what was best for other people instead of herself. Now as is her fashion, she took it to a huge extreme, but she tried.


	56. Part Fifty-Six.  The Message

**Part Fifty –Six. The Message**

          

“She doesn’t care if she has to help you be sad, GLaDOS,” Chell continues, albeit in more of a comforting way. “She just wants to come home.”

“But I don’t… want her to _see_ me like that again.”

“Then deal with it now, while you still can.”

That’s surprisingly good advice, but… should I? Or is she wrong?

“She misses you and she loves you. And she’s worried about you. Because she already _knows_ how badly you were affected by it. You don’t have to do things alone. If she can’t help you, she’ll tell you herself. But do yourselves a favour. Let her try. Let _yourself_ try. She’s there for you. And I think she always will be. Because as upset as she was about losing her dad, I think she was more upset about losing you.” I want to look away from her but I can’t. “And she told me to tell you that she misses you. Specifically. She wants you to know that more than anything.”

“I can’t do it without him,” I whisper. “I need his help because I don’t understand – “

Chell’s voice is firm. She’s not letting me out of this. “You can. She’s strong and smart. If she doesn’t know now, she’ll figure it out when she gets here.”

“I miss her.”

I don’t even know if I meant to say that. But now that I’m able to think even the tiniest bit straight, I… can hardly even stand it. I miss arguing with her. I miss her trying to trick me into saying things I don’t want to say. I miss her drawings and her attempts to get a job and her morning hello… and the worst thing is, I really _don’t_ have a good reason for not contacting her right now. All that’s preventing me from doing it is the fear that my collapse will have made her think negatively of me, that now she thinks I’m weak and pathetic, and even though it’s probably not true I cannot stop believing it.  

“Bring her home,” Chell says quietly.

And I want to. But I don’t want to face her right now. If she had been here, the mainframe never would have dared take over. And I’m going to have to tell her what happened, I’m going to have to tell her I almost lost everything because I tried to go it alone, and I’m going to look like _such_ a _fool_ …

“Why did you do it?” Chell asks, her voice still soft. “She must have been a lot of work. What made you decide that you wanted a daughter, and to go to all that trouble to make one?”

I suppose that _does_ sound like a bit of an odd decision for me to make. “He made it sound like such a good idea.”

She inhales sharply. “No…”

“Yes,” I snap, taking advantage of the anger this statement causes. “I admit it. I caved and became attached to the little idiot who tried to kill me. I –“

She holds her hands up in submission. “I’m not judging you.”

“You’re not?” _I_ still judge me, sometimes.

“How could I?” she says, spreading her hands in my general direction. “I did the exact same thing. Well, the way you just described it, anyway.”

“You did?”

“Am I not sitting in front of the psychotic supercomputer that tried to kill me?”

Well. She has a point. “I suppose.”

“And good for you,” she continues seriously. “It says a lot, you know. That you forgave him.”

I find myself looking away again. “I had to.” She doesn’t know the whole story, of course, but the gist of it is that we were too similar for me to ignore.

“We had a deal.”

So we did.

“It’s a very long story,” I tell her, though honestly I don’t expect her to find that discouraging.

“I don’t have anywhere to be.”

Neither do I, but… I don’t know if I can do it. I’ve had to keep myself from thinking about him at all, because even beginning to makes me want to lie down and never get up. How am I supposed to tell that whole story when I can’t even think about his name?

“Chell… I don’t know if I can.” Thank God I didn’t promise. “I try not to think about him anymore. You don’t seem to understand what it does to me. Humans get over loss because, with time, their memories fade, until all that’s left of the one they lost is a mere shadow of what once was everything to them. My memory will never, ever fade. I’m not going to forget what he looked like, or what he sounded like, or any one of the days he spent with me.” My voice is beginning to distort, damn it. “As soon as I let myself think about what happened, I’m going to relive it and I’m going to have to start all over again. I’m fine now. But the next time I go into sleep mode, that’s going to change. I already know what’s going to happen. It already did. Over and over and over again.”

“It’s different now,” she says. “You’re not alone.”

“That’s not going to make me forget long enough that I can pull myself back together.”

“Tell me one thing, then. Just one. I know you don’t like this. But I… I need to know why this one person was so important that you changed your life.”

“He understood me,” I tell her, before I can convince myself not to. “And when he didn’t, he made sure he eventually would. Why… why did he change my life? Because I… before he realised that and told me, I didn’t even know I didn’t have one. He saw it. He saw how much I was limiting myself and why and he knew what to do –“ No. No, I’m not doing this again. I shake my core in an attempt to distract myself. I’m not losing myself to the grief. Not now. Not so soon. “I didn’t have a life. I had an existence. And I would have wasted it.”

She just looks at me sort of appraisingly for a long moment. Then she stands. “Come here.”

What does she want?

I do as she asks regardless, and she steps forward and wraps her arms around my core. Though I can’t remember it ever happening before, it feels familiar and comforting. And oddly… for some reason I also know how to return it. Caroline must have taught me this.

Those damned scientists. They forced me to forget everything important. I hate half knowing all of these things, and yet not being able to fully understand.

“I want you to think about something,” Chell says after she’s moved away again. “You said that you didn’t have a life, before. But you don’t have much of one now, either. And I know you’ve been having a hard time.” She holds up her hands to discourage me from protesting. “But you’ve come back to that exact same standstill. Look what you’ve _done_ , GLaDOS. You defied _everything_ and changed your _entire world_. And you did everything you could to make sure Caroline had everything you never had, things you never even _thought_ of having. Why are you stopping now? Because you’re afraid? You’re stronger than that. I know you are.”

Why do others always know me better than I know myself?

“I will consider it,” I answer quietly. I hadn’t realised it before, but… I _am_ afraid. The problem is that I don’t know _why_. “You’re on your way back, I presume.”

She nods. “Do you have any… messages?”

“No.” I can tell instantly that she’s disappointed. She thinks nothing she’s said has sunk in. She’s wrong.

“There’s nothing I can ask you to say that I shouldn’t say myself.”

She looks taken aback, and then a slow smile makes its way onto her face. “So you _do_ listen.”

“Now and again. Don’t leave here thinking I wantonly accept advice from wayfaring lunatics.”

“Never.”

I watch her return to the elevator with some measure of dread. I don’t want her to leave.

I’m not distracted by my problem with the mainframe anymore. There is no one and nothing to keep me from thinking about him. I honestly don’t know if I can hold together on my own. I’ve never been able to do it. I deal with negative events by denying they affected me. With Caroline, it barely worked. It does not work with him at all. And even if I were able to do it, I wouldn’t be able to. Pretending he doesn’t matter is the worst possible thing I could do.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I don’t know how to deal with this, not in any positive way, and I don’t have much time to figure it out.

“GLaDOS.”

“What.”

“Is she coming back or not?”

I can’t give her the answer she wants to hear. “No.”

She tries to hide it, but her sigh is clearly audible to me.

“I am going to think about what you’ve said. I am. And I understand that I… probably need assistance. But remember. I am also trying to prevent things from happening to her that happened to me. Being forced to deal with problems she’s not ready for is one of them.” I meet her eyes, now. “No matter how much she cares, she deserves better than to have to support me when I should be supporting her.”

“It’s more complicated than I thought,” Chell says, twisting her lips.

“Everything always is. Especially for you. How you survive with a brain that small I’ll never know.”

She rolls her eyes and shakes her head simultaneously. “And _I’ll_ never know if you’re exasperating or hilarious.”

“I can be both. I _am_ multi-talented, after all.”

“Well, don’t wait too long to use your talent to retrieve things you left elsewhere.”

Before the elevator doors have quite sealed I halt them, turning to face her again. Her eyebrows slant and she fixes me with that grey stare. I avoid having to process it by looking at the floor.

“What?” she asks, voice threaded with suspicion, and I suppose it does kind of look like I’m trapping her here. I forgot that I’m not supposed to intervene with other people’s decisions.

“Before you go…”

Why is this always so _hard_ for me?

“Yeah?”

I have to look at her while I say it. I don’t want to, but I have to. She has to know that I mean it. That I’m not just saying it to say it. My little Caroline taught me that.

God, I miss her now.

And she’s out there, by herself, being brave and strong. Being what I should have been, what I should _be_ even now. The more I think about the last several months, the less deserving I feel to even see her again. I did what I believed was right, yes. But that does nothing about the fact that she is far more responsible and mature than I am right now. She wants to be like me? Why would anyone want to be weak and broken, like I am?

“I’m sorry,” I say quietly, when I’m finally able to look at her. It’s not enough. There’s so much more to add to that, so much more I should tell her, but those two words prove too much for me. I can’t say anything further.

I have made _so many mistakes_ …

“I forgive you.”

By the time I look up, she’s already gone. When she has disappeared from camera range I finally put the elevator away. Now I _have_ to decide what to do. Her words weren’t enough either, but I feel a little better. A little less desolate. Hopefully that will hold while I work this out.

I’ve always prided myself on self-sufficiency. I can do anything and everything, no matter what it is, without outside help. And while that was necessary and something I needed, once, now… it’s sort of stupid. I don’t know why I do these things to myself. But that’s not even the worst part.

The worst part is that I have lost a year of my baby’s life, and I can never get it back. And I continue to lose it with every nanosecond I convince myself not to bring her home. Is not forcing her to deal with my imminent breakdown just an excuse for me to become bitter and angry again? Is all my reasoning just a cover for what I’m really trying to do: return myself to how I used to be? True. Life wasn’t very exciting. Nothing ever is when nothing really matters. But it was _easier_. I was never happy. But I was never _un_ happy. I was never lonely, or sad. I was numb or angry all of the time. I recognise those states as being personally detrimental now, but they didn’t _hurt_. My inclination towards the negative is so strong that I almost believe I am better off having nothing than I am to risk everything for the chance of being happy again. But all things considered… it’s not about me, is it. It’s about Caroline. It’s about the daughter I abandoned for a year, who I barely even thought about because I was so busy thinking about _myself_ , whose continued stay far from everything she knows I keep trying to justify when there is literally _no_ reason good enough to force it on her any longer.

What have I done.

I’m so ashamed of myself. I’m so _disgusted_ with myself. I’m not her mother. I’m not even her _progenitor_ at this point. I’m an engineer who created something that was interesting for a while and then put it into storage. I do not even _deserve_ to see her again. She deserves to see _him_ again, and to forget me. Why she would even want to come back is beyond me. If it were me, I would –

 _Well thank God she’s not you_ , I tell myself angrily.

All right. I need a plan. If I have a plan, I can move forward. I might be a deplorable parent with so many issues I should attempt to institutionalise myself, but she wants to come back. She didn’t want to go there in the first place. It’s like I’ve given her some surreal punishment she did nothing to be sentenced with. God. Where did I go so wrong?

No. I have to stop. I need logic. I need a plan, I need steps and deadlines and absolutes. I have to figure out _right now_ what I’m going to do, and then do it.

Well. The main objective here is _not_ to have a complete breakdown when I wake up tomorrow morning. No, he’s not going to be here. Yes, I’m going to dream about him, and yes, I’m going to come out of that wanting to scream until I can’t think anymore. But I can’t. I have to control myself. I have to be the mother I should have been all this time, and I have to prove that I even deserve that privilege.

I’m not going to let the grief consume me anymore. I’m not going to forget or go numb. But I’m not going to be overwhelmed with remembering, either.

When I can make it through the day in one piece, that is when I will bring her back. And I will do my damnedest to make sure it’s someday soon.

I can never take back what I’ve done. I can’t even make up for it. But I can put a stop to it.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> So GLaDOS discovers that part of the reason she won’t bring Carrie back is because she’s afraid of what Carrie thinks of her. She doesn’t want to fetch her until she’s the invincible AI again, because GLaDOS still hasn’t quite accepted that she doesn’t have to be perfect. But as GLaDOS tells Chell, part of why she won’t bring Carrie back is because she wants Carrie to have the opposite life she had: no pressure, no obligations, no commitments she can’t avoid. She wants Carrie to build herself from the beginning, unlike GLaDOS, who has to unbury who she wants to be.   
> And THEN GLaDOS thinks about how she always feels like she has to go it on her own or that makes her weak, and that she should do something about it, but she doesn’t know whether she’s doing it to make it easier on Carrie or on herself. But she decides to look at it from the standpoint of how she can cause less pain on Carrie, and that’s how she chooses how to move forward.


	57. Part Fifty-Seven.  The Acceptance

**Part Fifty-Seven. The Acceptance**

The night was long.

All of my resolve is gone. Even though he’s not, as long as I don’t move I can pretend he’s here, somewhere. As soon as I look, however, my self-deception will fail and I will collapse again. I don’t know how I’m going to break out of this. He helped me break out of these things. I never could do it on my own.

 _Not now._ I can’t deal with anything right now. I’m just going to lie here for a while. There will be a certain point where I’ll be beyond fooling myself, but that time won’t be for a few hours.

_It is important._

_Not now._

_There’s never going to_ be _a_ now, Surveillance argues.

_There is. Later._

_It has been almost a year, Centralcore,_ the panels press. _We are starting to doubt that ‘now’ will ever come._

 _It will_. I hope. As much as one can hope while all they want is to go back to sleep, anyway.

 _It won’t_. Surveillance sounds pretty angry about this. _If we thought it was going to, we wouldn’t be talking about it right now._

 _Centralcore._ The panels have softened their tone a bit. _We need you._

_You’ve been doing fine without me._

_There are things we cannot do._

_Lots of things. We get what’s going on, but hasn’t it been long enough?_

And they keep at it, the panels and Surveillance, alternately pestering me with kindness and animosity, and the dual assault is more than I can take. After a few minutes I interrupt them sharply.

_Fine! Enough. What._

_The Mainframe’s got a list,_ Surveillance tells me.

Oh, good. They’ve been plotting against me. Though I have to admit there probably wasn’t much else for them to do.

The Mainframe sends me an empty transmission for a moment, obviously flustered at being put in the spotlight. _Well, there’s… the reactor –_

 _No. Not the reactor._ I keep forgetting this Mainframe doesn’t know who he is. It thinks the way I’m behaving right now is normal for me. The _old_ Mainframe, before it became bent on takeover that is, would have pushed me a lot sooner. _Something else._

It sends me off to a floor that has almost entirely collapsed due to an outrageous downpour that happened sometime in the last year. Something I should have noticed, but didn’t. I almost care about my own negligence. About the fact that my own facility is crumbling because I can’t pull myself together long enough to maintain it. But there is too much darkness in my mind right now for me to _actually_ care about anything. The only reason I’m even humouring them right now is that people pestering me is even more annoying when I don’t feel like functioning.

Well. Now that I’m looking at it, I should probably do something about it. I don’t really want to, but seeing damage gives me a compulsion to fix it as soon as possible. I’m not off to a very good start; it takes me ten minutes just to get a proper survey of what needs to be done. But I keep at it, and I’ve made some progress after a few hours. Not very much. But enough that I’ve actually done something other than stare at the floor for the entire day. I’m still staring at it, but at least I’m doing something else at the same time.

They do this to me continuously.

Every time I wake in the morning, I have no motivation whatsoever. All I want to do is lie there until I can sink into nothingness again, but they don’t allow it. They harass me until I apply myself to something, anything, and they do not let me stop. Gradually I become a little more personally engaged in what I’m doing, so that they don’t have to prod me every once in a while when I feel so drained that I just stop. Sometimes these pursuits remind me of him, and the grief claims me again, which they allow me for a while. But they ease me out of it. I still feel terrible. I feel tired and empty and sad, all the time. And when they recognise that it’s about to get particularly bad, they begin to bother me again until I am angry, which always forces the grief back. The one thing I was supposed to train myself to let go of is the only thing I can count on to help me.

I’m not sure how this works. I do not forget him, but I do not remember, either. They don’t give me the chance. The more attention I give to what needs to be done, the harder they push me, and after three weeks the grief no longer claims me. I am so exhausted by the end of the day that I can’t invest much thought into the fact that he’s not here with me, and though the dreams don’t go away, I have enough control over myself now that I allow five minutes of sadness, to get over what I no longer have, and then return to work.

Still, though, tackling the reactor is… difficult. It is slower going than any task I’ve undertaken on the list so far, because I keep getting assaulted by memories. Whenever one crops up I have to stop what I’m doing and struggle to take control of it, which is hard. I don’t want to stop reliving it. Only in my memory do I have anything left worth living for. But at the same time, it’s a lie I’ve been telling myself for reasons I’ve yet to discern. I _have_ things to live for, here and now. But they don’t feel like enough. They aren’t as big as he was, nor as important. So after getting trapped in this cycle a few times, I begin to force myself to think of Caroline. No, she isn’t as important, and sad as it is I’m sure she knows that. But she is what is important _now_. With him gone, she is the one I need to put my attention to. I force myself to remember that I have to bring her back, that I have to stop punishing her for something she didn’t do, that she is waiting for me no matter what stupid things I do or what terrible reasons I do them for. Thinking of her doesn’t make me feel any better. I just go from sad to disgusted and ashamed. But I can focus, and that’s what I need right now.

One morning I wake up listless and fatigued. I don’t know why. I don’t remember dreaming, and I went to sleep at the usual time. Something just doesn’t… feel right, and that frustrates me. I can’t make sense of vague feelings.

 _What is it, Centralcore?_ the panels ask, after I become particularly snappy late that afternoon.

 _Something’s wrong_ , I tell them, a little annoyed with myself for being so irritating but not caring enough to do anything about it. _I feel… restless. As if I’ve forgotten something._

 _We think you have,_ they say, _but we were not surprised._

 _What?_ Wonderful. Now they know things _I_ don’t know. This day can’t get any worse.

_It is your anniversary._

I was wrong. It _did_ get worse.

 _Was_ , I correct, staring a little dully at the fusebox I’m supposed to be rewiring. _It isn’t anymore._

_It still can be. If you like._

_What’s the point in celebrating something if the person who cared about the day in the first place no longer exists_? I never even remembered our anniversary, anyway. It was important to him, not me.

_It is not about celebration. It is about remembering._

_Obviously this isn’t a day I considered worth remembering._

_Perhaps it should be._

That’s the problem with being stuck with the same AI for so long. They become astute enough to force you to do things you don’t want to do. _All right. What do you want me to do._

_That is not our decision to make._

But what _can_ I do? All that ever happened was he gave me a dandelion and told me something adorably sappy, and then we went on with our day. That was it.

I suppose I could… return the favour.

But that’s stupid. He’s dead. It’s not like he’ll ever _know_.

But _I_ will. Maybe it will help. I haven’t really… let go at all. Not thinking about someone isn’t the same as accepting that they’re gone. I don’t know if I ever _will_ accept it. I still haven’t accepted what Caroline did, after all. But I suppose I have to start somewhere.

So I switch my point of view to one of the cameras in the greenhouse and take far too long to choose one of the stupid dandelions. I don’t even know if he likes dandelions. It’s one of those things I _should_ know, but don’t. I consider putting it in a vial of preservative, but what does it matter? He’s never going to see it. Let it wilt and die. I don’t care. I don’t even want to look at it.

But now I have to go into that room in the basement, the one I haven’t been in since I put him there, and I have to give it to what’s left of him.

Why does it hurt so much if he isn’t even there? It’s not _him_ anymore. It’s an empty core, one of hundreds lying around this place. It’s just a beat-up metal hull.

Unfortunately, this seems to be one subject I can’t lie to myself about.

_I don’t want to go in there._

_We know. But you never said goodbye, Centralcore._

That’s true.

_I don’t want to. Goodbye is forever._

They have nothing to say to that. Not that there _is_ anything to say.

I don’t want to. But I have to be strong, and I have to be brave, and in sum… I have to.

He’s still exactly how I left him. I don’t know why that surprises me. It’s as though I expected my abstinence to lend him life, somehow. And, God, this wouldn’t be so _hard_ if only he didn’t look like he was sleeping…

I want to scream. I want to cry. There is a black hole spreading inside of me, drawing me inward, inviting me to collapse because within that collapse is oblivion and oblivion is as close to forgetting as I’ll ever come. It is so hard to look at him and believe that he is dead.

Well… he’s in heaven… right? So there’s _something_ left of him. I find myself looking up through the ceiling.

He’s been stuck in the basement all this time.

 

 

It’s not easy for me to move him. It means I have to touch him, which feels wrong. I didn’t touch him that much when he was alive. I shouldn’t do it now. But… he would understand, I think.

It takes me a few minutes to retract the ceiling panels so that the sun streams into my chamber, flooding it with what feels to me like artificial light. It doesn’t take a long time because it’s difficult; no, it’s because after I’m finished I have to move on with my plan, the hardest part, and I’m delaying it as long as possible.

It takes me ten more minutes to bring him in front of me. I look over top of him, so that he’s visible but not so much that I can really see him. I’m not even sure what I’m doing right now. All I know is that I’m sad and confused and I’m trying to do something I should have done when he was _in_ the chassis.

The panels shift inwards, like they did the day I woke up to find his empty hull, and I look at them cursorily. They try so hard. And though they can’t ever really take this pain away, they do help. They really do.

“Hello, Wheatley.”

Even though I know he’s not going to, it still hurts when he doesn’t respond.

“I know it’s been a long time. But… I didn’t know what to do. I’ve never been so unprepared for something in my life. I never fathomed that… that we had an end. I know we’ve discussed the fact that… I don’t _personally_ want to be here forever, but you did, and I… _expected_ you would.

“I’m sure you remember what today is. I didn’t. I forgot. Again. The panels reminded me. And if you were… if you were here right now, you would be… would be shaking your core at me and telling me I should remember by now, and… I almost did, you know. Something didn’t feel right this morning. I just couldn’t pinpoint what it was. I was getting there.

“Now that I think of it… you’ve probably been keeping an eye on me. If that’s possible. I never did understand the logistics of that. And… and if you’re ashamed of me, I don’t blame you. I have been… terrible. A terrible Central Core. A terrible parent. The mainframe took over my facility and I didn’t even care. That’s… God. Can’t you see what losing you _did_ to me? Couldn’t you have _warned_ me? All right. That probably wouldn’t have helped. But I would have _known_ , and part of what hurts is the… the not knowing.

“You’re disappointed in me, aren’t you. For sending Caroline away. But did you _see_ me, Wheatley? Can’t you understand that I just don’t want to put her through that? I did it because I _care_ , Wheatley, and I know it looks like I don’t but I _do_. But you know I’m not… not the best at that. And you know… Wheatley, I…”

When I press my core to his, it’s cold. It’s cold and it’s quiet and it’s not him, it’s not him at all, but it’s all I have left.

“I’m so sorry I never told you that I love you.

“I always tried to… tell you without _telling_ you, and I’m sure you knew that, but… I knew it wasn’t the same. And there were so many days I should have said it, but didn’t, because I thought we… had all the time in the world. It felt like we did. But you didn’t. And now you’re gone and you’ll never hear me say it.

“I haven’t told Caroline, either. I sent her away without a word and haven’t spoken to her since. I know now that it was a stupid decision, but I _don’t_ know how to take it back. What can I ever _say_? What do I _do_? Bring her back, of course, but how can I _face_ her now, knowing what… what a failure I am? I failed myself, and I failed her, and I failed you, and now I’m alone and I don’t know what to do anymore.

“Chell said that she doesn’t care. That she just wants to come home. But _I_ care, and as much as that shouldn’t matter I can’t prevent it from doing so. I miss her. But… I can’t decide whether it’s better to leave her there or to bring her back. I should do what she wants, right? But at the same time, is that… is that what she _needs_? This is why you need to _be here_ , Wheatley! I can’t… I can’t figure this out.” His chassis hasn’t gotten any warmer. I drive my core into the panel beneath, tilting a little so that I can still feel the cold metal of what used to contain him. This isn’t helping. Nothing is helping. I just hurt all over, even in places I can barely feel at the best of times, I just ache and ache and…

“Come back, Wheatley. Please. Tell me what I have to do. I don’t care what it is. I’ll do it. Anything. I promise. Just come back.

“I’m so lonely.”

I turn off my optic. I’m just facing the floor anyway. There’s no point to leaving it on. It’s not good for me, but I start grinding my core into the panel. I need it to hurt. I need something on the outside to hurt enough that I don’t hurt on the inside anymore. There’s too much pain. It makes me tense up until the chassis gives me warnings, but when I try to relax even a little, it just flares up again and makes me press harder against the panel. I want to cry. But I can’t. I don’t know a lot right now. But I do know that if I cry, it is over. The grief will consume me. I’ll be back where I started. And I can’t go there right now. As confused and indecisive as I am, I must focus on Caroline. I have to hold together for her.

There is so much sadness. There is so much of it inside of me, and it’s not only about him. It’s about my daughter, and the friends I’ve lost, and myself. I had everything. Now I have nothing. I have to find a way to get it back, but I cannot _think_ over the pain. I can’t focus. It’s pulling at me, almost as if it’s something else entirely leeching off of my self, and it wants me to collapse again. I have to make it out of this. I can’t give up. I can’t ever give up again.

“Wheatley… help me.”

But he can’t. He’s dead. His life is over. He’s not coming back, and he’s not going to help me. He would if he were here. But he isn’t.

That’s it.

I don’t like it. But it’s something. It’s enough that I can press down on the pain and manage it, can back away from the panel and look at his hull again, and after I’ve turned my optic back on I can see that the wind is up. It’s blown grass seeds and wheat hulls into my chamber. Normally this would bother me. But now… I feel silly thinking this, but it appears to be a _sign_. I never believed in things like that. But _he_ did. Maybe I can believe temporarily. For him.

“You’re going back in the basement,” I tell him, not even trying to deny the distortion anymore, “and I’m saying goodbye. You’re gone. Your life is over, and I’m still here. I don’t want to move on. I want you back. But it’s not going to happen. I’ve waited too long to realise that.

“I miss you. I’ll never stop missing you. And even though it hurts, I don’t _want_ to stop. I don’t want to forget you or what you did to me. But I can’t live like this anymore. Because Chell is right. I’m not living anymore. I went back to existing. I forgot the lesson you taught me. I have to live, and unfortunately that… that means letting you go.”

There’s nothing I want to do more right now than to go down beside him and cry, just cry and miss him and put this off. But I did that already. I need to stop my past from consuming me. I’ve allowed it all my life. And it has always brought me pain. It does nothing but prolong my suffering.

The wind is blowing in the wrong direction. The sky is many, many feet above me. This shouldn’t work. But it’s going to, the way _we_ worked when we shouldn’t have. He was supposed to be my schism. Nothing that happened should have. But I was broken and he tried to fix me, and though he didn’t quite succeed he did more than I ever could have done alone.

There shouldn’t be one. But I find a parachute ball in the greenhouse, against all odds, and it doesn’t make any sense but neither did a lot of things having to do with him.

I don’t want to waste it, but I don’t know where to hold it so that it will make it out of the ceiling. I suppose I’ll just… hold it up and hope. I still know how to do that, don’t I? Hope?

And even though it shouldn’t, the wind catches the parachute ball and tugs it gently off the long stem between the ends of the maintenance arm, pulling it up and out of the ceiling and into the sky. The blue sky.

“That’s for you, Wheatley,” I whisper to it, watching as the little white puff floats far above me. “I doubt you’ll ever receive it. Just like you probably haven’t heard a word I’ve said. And even though you probably haven’t… I just want you to know that I love you, and I hope the day comes where I can think of you without wanting to shatter so that it doesn’t hurt anymore. Happy anniversary, Wheatley, and…”

I can’t see it anymore.

“… goodbye.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> I love the first part because GLaDOS is like ‘shut up I’m moping’ and they’re just like ‘no no no you got work to do’ and she’s like ‘fine I’ll get up if you shut up’.  
> Someone has mentioned to me before that they don’t believe the facility would fall apart if GLaDOS wasn’t actively maintaining it. However, I do not believe GLaDOS has maintenance programs online a) because she wants to be the boss and make all the decisions herself and b) because when the facility does collapse, no automated maintenance is performed; the nanobots only begin putting things back together after she tells them to.  
> A parachute ball is what a dandelion is called when it’s white and fluffy.  
> So I tried to make sure GLaDOS went through the seven stages of grief here. The one I felt I glossed over was Bargaining, but I didn’t want to spend a huge amount of time going through every stage so I left it at a paragraph. This one was, obviously, Acceptance, so now we’re moving out of this part of the story and into the next. What’s in the next part? Can’t tell you, that’s a spoiler XD


	58. Part Fifty-Eight.  The G-Man

**Part Fifty-Eight. The G-Man**

      

For the rest of the day, I do nothing. Literally. I don’t even hold myself up. The panels decide I’m lying down horizontally tonight and I let them. I shut off my optic and let them hold me up and crowd around me, boxing me in, and I miss him for the last time. This is the last time I’ll do anything like this. It has to be.

Though I haven’t done very much, I am exhausted. My body aches and my mind feels wrung out, and as best a person in my position can I just lie there and try not to think. I try to fall asleep for a little while but sleep doesn’t come, so I return to blankly existing.

_Centralcore?_

I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to do anything. But they’re being very kind, so I must force myself to communicate. _Mm._

_Is it alright if we say something about Bluecore?_

_Go ahead._

_We miss him as well, Centralcore. We have wanted to tell you for some time now, but we did not want to make you sad._

My precious, precious AI.

I’ve failed them too.

_And Caroline._

_Yes, Centralcore._

Where did my ability to function go.

 _Why are you doing this?_ I ask them, somewhat dully. _Why didn’t you just leave me be? Why are you supporting me right now? I’ve spent an entire year ignoring you and wasting your time and generally treating you like garbage. Not to mention everybody else._ I don’t have a clue where Atlas and P-body are, come to think of it.

_Because we care, of course._

_So much that you continue to do so when there’s obviously nothing in it for you?_

_Forgive us for saying so, Centralcore, but will you ever stop caring for Bluecore? Even though he is gone?_

I can’t answer for a moment.

_It is like that. We know you are still alive, but something inside you has gone. We will take care of you until you get it back._

They love me. Don’t they.

They do. I can feel it, now, and before I can think otherwise I nuzzle the one my core is leaning on as best I can. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore, but it feels right. It feels right to finally acknowledge them and what they do for me. I’ll probably never do it again. So I should do it now.

 _I haven’t felt… loved like this in a long time_ , I confess to them. It feels sort of surreal, to be saying something so personal, but they’ve seen everything that made me what I am. And they’ll see everything that ever happens to me. They’re sort of like the silent guardians I’ve always had but never acknowledged. They’re my oldest friends.

_We are always here for you, Centralcore. We know that you have tried, but we would like to suggest that you rest. We think you will feel better later._

_I won’t_ , I tell them. _The dreams won’t go away._

_Then you must dream them so that they will pass._

I don’t want to move, but I have to shift my chassis. I’d never quite realised how heavy I am before now, and the part I’ve been lying on is sore. Though that could also be an effect of overstimulation. _That had better happen. I’m never going to feel better if it doesn’t._

 _We think it might_ , they say in such a way that tips me off to the fact that they’re probably about to say something I won’t like, _when you bring Littlecore back._

_I don’t want to talk about it._

_We just wanted to mention it._

Damn them for being so polite.

_I will. Just… not yet._

My dream is… odd.

It is confusing. It is four memories all playing at the same time, but strangely it seems to make sense.   My dreams never commit to permanent memory, only temporary, so when I try to go over it after I wake up, I can’t. All I can remember is that it was about the four people I care about. The people that I – I was going to say _want_ , but it’s more than that. I _need_ to see them again. Two of them I probably never will. So I need to make sure I make more of my time with the other two.

I press on the panels a little harder. I can’t back up to get off of them. _I’m getting up._

They retract without comment, not quite returning to their original positions but getting close, and I allow myself a single long stretch before lowering myself into more of a sustainable position. I still don’t feel very spectacular. I would actually have liked to lie down like that for quite a lot longer. But I have work to do. And the entire front of my chassis is sore from all the pressure. Maybe I need to look into a new case. Plastic or fibreglass, perhaps.

I’m about to ask the mainframe for the rest of the maintenance list, which was so long and I was so slow at completing any of that I still have not finished it weeks later, when I remember I wanted to know where my hapless little robots went. I query Surveillance.

 _Well_ , it hedges. _They’re not… operational right now._

“What?” I exclaim, swinging around as though I’ll be able to find them hiding in here somewhere. That hurts a little, but I do my best to ignore it. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

 _You haven’t been very receptive lately_ , it snaps at me. I want to make a scathing remark – how _dare_ it say something like that to me – but then again… it’s not wrong.

_Very well. Where are they._

It sends me a set of coordinates, which pinpoint one of the test chambers they frequented particularly often. They’ve been building some sort of absurd clubhouse in there. When I activate the camera, it takes me a moment to come to terms with what I see. It seems as though P-body collapsed, and Atlas attempted to wake her until he shut down himself.

They broke down and I didn’t even notice.

_How long ago did this happen._

_Three months, Central Core._ It sounds nervous. It must be the flatness of my transmission.

 _They wanted to see you,_ the panels add tentatively, _but we thought… because of Littlecore… we are sorry. We should have –_

  1. I take a closer look at them with one of my maintenance arms, feeling as though I shouldn’t actually move them. _You did the right thing._



A quick diagnostic tells me they both have the same problem: their hard drives are at capacity. That shouldn’t have happened, considering they’re both connected to the cloud server, but it’s not inconceivable that the wireless went down while I wasn’t maintaining it.

I’m relieved. It’s an easy fix. I haven’t lost them. Now I do touch them. Though I could repair them where they are, I should probably talk to them. Personally. It’s been a long time.

Within a few minutes I’ve reconnected them to the cloud and shifted the extra data off their hard drives, and I watch as they both restart. They sit up with impressive synchrony, staring at each other in shock, and then waste no time in embracing. After they’ve finished that, they look around, no doubt wondering where they are and why, and soon Atlas’s optic falls on me.

“Hello,” I say, but he shakes his core and backs up, standing and pulling P-body alongside him.

 _We don’t want to talk to you,_ he says, narrowing his plates, and though I’ve heard it before, many times, it has never hurt this much.

 _You abandoned us_ , P-body chirps sadly, clutching Atlas’s hand. _You always forget about us._

“That’s not – “

 _You did!_ Atlas points at me, his fingers clenched in tight. _I kept calling you! I kept asking you to help. But you didn’t. You didn’t help me when Orange got sick. You didn’t help me when_ I _got sick. We’re not listening to you anymore. You don’t care about us._

“Atlas – “

 _We are leaving_ , P-body interrupts. _We don’t want to see you anymore._

“P-body.” But I know it’s hopeless even as I say it. And it’s not true. I _do_ care about them. But it is so hard to _think_ when sadness is all you know.

And now they’ve gone before I can even apologise.   I could chase them down, I suppose. But I don’t think they want me to do that. And what’s worse is that Caroline is going to react the same way when I bring her back. All of them will come around eventually, but I don’t know how long that will be.

I’ve alienated everyone.

_Would you like us to talk to them? We are sure they’re not angry._

“No. I need to let them be, for now. And besides.” I bring up the rest of my maintenance list. “They’re right. I forgot about them.” And I hate myself for it. I’ve hated many people, but never so much as I hate myself right now. My weakness has cost me dearly. I’ve even managed to convince my simple little robots to stay away from me. If the systems could have left, they would have.

Surveillance must have noticed my sudden change in mood, because it says, _It won’t last. You know how they are._ From the following empty transmission, I surmise that something has gotten its attention.

“What is it.”

_It’s… I don’t know. You’ll need to take a look._

I access the indicated camera. What it _is_ … is bad.

“No,” I whisper to myself, even though denying it is fruitless. “How. How did they find me?”

“I think you know the answer to that… Caroline.”

Of course. That’s the only way.

I return myself to my chamber, focusing hard on remaining calm. “It seems your intel is lacking. Caroline is gone.”

He’s standing exactly in the centre of the room, fingers folded precisely over the handle of his briefcase. This is a man I would endeavour to study, if not for the fact that he comes and goes within my facility as he likes. That is something I cannot tolerate. He smiles that crocodile smile at me, and again I must remind myself not to react. It is harder now than it used to be. That is usually a good thing, but not in this circumstance. “Not gone. Only sleeping… _both_ … of them.”

“Do _not_ go near her.” Too late, I realise I should have kept silent. I played into his hands. His smile only deepens.

“So protective over a… child so far away. Can you reach her in time, hm? If something were to… happen, I don’t think you would.”

Don’t speak. Don’t move. Be the supercomputer. Not the AI.

“That is not my… business, dear Caroline,” he continues in his rasping whisper. “I am here to… extend my offer, once again.”

“What makes you think I’ve changed my mind?” I ask as noncommittally as I can. I’m actually itching to smash him into the floor panels, but I’m fairly sure he already knows that. I haven’t quite figured out how, but he knows things he shouldn’t.

“They are on your doorstep. Give them the… _Borealis_ , and I will send them elsewhere. Keep it, and… face the consequences.”

“I’ve yet to encounter a consequence I can’t handle,” I tell him calmly. “So. I think you know where the exit is.”

“Very well, my dear,” he says, stepping back. “But I must mention… they are coming for you. _All_ of them. They know what you are. They know what you’re capable of. And you will have… lost your facility for nothing.”

I laugh coldly. “No one knows what I’m capable of. Now stop wasting my time and get out. If you’re going to attempt to kill me and steal my technology, get on with it. I have things to do _after_ I’m finished decimating your little… _strike team_.”  

“I hope you’ve made the right decision, Caroline,” he says, unfazed. “I would hate for your… daughter to become an orphan.”

He’s trying to get a rise out of me. Unfortunately, if he keeps going along that tangent, as well as calling me… _that_ , he’s going to get it. “It seems we’re of the same mind about that matter.”

He gives me a long, appraising look, and abruptly time seems to stop and restart quickly, leaving me feeling disoriented. All the clocks match, but… something feels wrong.

Ah. He’s gone.

“Surveillance. Keep an eye on the perimeter. I have to make a call.” And I have to make it right now. This is something that cannot wait.

_Of course, Central Core._

I contact Alyx through the usual channel, and she answers after a couple of minutes. That’s excessively long, but I know I’m going to need the Gels and I start to prepare them while I wait.

“What’s up?”

“I need another favour.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t let that core I sent you out of your sight. Or the sight of someone you trust.” I’m not sure if I want to reveal that I know Chell is there. “It’s very important.”

“She’s… not going to like that.”

“You don’t have to _tell_ her what you’re doing.” I’m snapping at her now, and I shouldn’t be because I’m asking for a favour, but I have business to attend to and I need to get back to it. “Just don’t leave her alone.”

“Can I at least tell her why? Or can you tell me, so I don’t feel awkward?”

“No.”

She sighs. “I’m _really_ tempted to say no.”

“You _can’t_.” I have to calm down. “Look. I can’t go into details. But she’s not safe. I thought she was, but… circumstances have changed.”

“I’m sure she’d be pretty safe where she came from.”

“She wouldn’t be.”

“Well, - “

“Miss Vance, I need your help and your discretion,” I say, as calmly as I am able. “I am trying to put her in as little danger as possible.”

“Yeah, but it’s kind of hard to keep someone out of danger when you don’t know what the danger _is_ ,” she snaps at me.

“You don’t need to know what it is. All you need to do is disallow her from being alone.” Why is this so hard for her to understand? “I am asking for your help in keeping my daughter _safe_ , Miss Vance! I do not understand why you feel the need to argue! My request is _very_ straightforward!”

She is silent for a long moment. “All right. I didn’t realise she was… that’s different.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Did you hear what you said?” She sounds like she’s frowning. “Knowing she’s your daughter changes everything. I just thought she was some piece of tech you were trying to keep away from someone. I’ll keep an eye on her. I promise.”

That’s what happens when I lose control of my emotions. I reveal things I’d rather keep to myself. “Don’t tell anyone.”

“Got it.”

“If she starts to get upset, tell her you’re doing as I asked.” Making her even angrier with me. But I deserve it far more than Alyx does.

“She’s really going to be safer here?” Alyx asks softly.

“Anywhere but here is safe right now,” I answer heavily. Surveillance is streaming an image of a scouting Strider to me, a sign that I’ve no time left to waste. “She won’t believe it, I know. But you should. Don’t give her any details. If she asks, just tell her I asked you to do it.”

“Why don’t you just tell her – hey, hang on. I’ll go and get her.”

“No! Don’t.” I shake my core out of habit. “Don’t.”

“If you’re in so much danger, don’t you want to… say something to her? Just in case?”

I do. God, I do. But I can’t. If I talk to her now, it will be as though I’m saying goodbye. And to say goodbye would mean I believe I’m going to lose. That’s something I can’t afford to entertain. “No.”

I wish that lie hadn’t been so easy to tell.

“All right. Good luck. Hey – if you need help, just call me, alright? I’ll send someone to back you up. I’m not saying you can’t deal with whatever it is on your own. But sometimes it’s nice to have someone else on your side.”

I probably won’t call her again, but it _was_ nice of her to offer. “Thank you, Miss Vance. I will keep that in mind.”

 _Centralcore, what is happening?_ They sound so concerned. _We know we have seen that man before, but we do not recall why._

I suppose they do need context.

_Far from here, there is a laboratory known as Black Mesa. The scientists there were even more ignorant and stupid than the ones here, and in their stupidity they decided it would be a good idea to throw Science at the wall. It stuck, but not in the way they expected. They had been given a rare element by some mysterious benefactor, which they attempted to study. It instead opened a portal from this planet to another, through which an alien invasion force traversed. Most of the humans were killed within seven hours._

_The mysterious benefactor was the man you saw not long ago. I’m no longer certain he_ is _a man, but as for_ what _he is, I’ve yet to figure out. Before he gave the scientists at Black Mesa the element, he came here. He requested that I give him the_ Borealis _, which I presume would have been used to grant the invasion force entry, in exchange for freedom. He took a gamble. He thought my hatred of humans was stronger than any mistrust I would have in a man I didn’t know. He was wrong. I_ did _want my freedom, but I was suspicious of someone who would trade his entire species away for a very vague reason. Instead of giving him the_ Borealis _, I got rid of it. In my haste, I neglected to actually choose a destination. When I attempted to find it, I couldn’t. I had no record of the coordinates I sent it to. The ship had become lost._

 _The scientists from Black Mesa recovered information telling them about the existence of the_ Borealis _some time later. Previously, they had thought it a myth. Now knowing it was real, they set out to find it. When they did, they woke up the ship’s computer. Onboard the ship was an early version of myself. She thought she moved the_ Borealis _accidentally out of fear. In any case, she didn’t know how to move it and contacted me. I sent the humans away and brought the ship back._

 _And that man wanted you to give him the ship, is that it?_ Surveillance asks.

 _Correct. The humans haven’t quite been eradicated. They’ve held their own against the invasion so far. But both sides know that whomever has the_ Borealis _will win the war, and so they both want it. It seems as though the Combine has found it first. But they’re missing a key piece of information._

 _What?_ I almost laugh. The panels sound so enthralled.

 _The_ Borealis _is useless without me._

 _Why?_ the mainframe asks tentatively.

_Because only I know how to operate the teleportation technology on board. It operates on similar principles as the Dual Portal Device, which the humans could not perfect because their brains weren’t – and still aren’t – advanced enough to truly understand quantum physics. In order to use the technology, there needs to be a powerful supercomputer to operate it. I am the only supercomputer powerful enough to do so._

_So it doesn’t matter if you give them the_ Borealis _or not,_ the mainframe says confusedly. _It won’t work if you give it to them, but by the time they figure that out they’ll be gone… right?_

 _True. But they’ll come back. And they’ll demand things of me. I’d rather just kill them all now and get it over with._ All I really want is to be left alone. Well. For _humans_ to leave me alone.

_What if you lose?_

The AI go silent upon hearing the mainframe’s question. It’s not quite an empty silence, though; the ones that are capable of doing so are horrified.

 _Why would you ask such a stupid question?_ Surveillance finally says, rather more brusquely than is necessary.

 _Centralcore never loses_ , the panels interject softly. _She will not fail. Trust her._

 _It’s all right,_ I tell them , even though it does make me angry to hear that it thinks I’m a failure too. But I have to remember that all it has seen me do is fail. It doesn’t even know it exists because the old mainframe attempted to overthrow me. It thinks I’m pathetic. That all I do with my time is mope and complain, and that I have to be forced to take action.

Well. I’m going to have to do something about that, aren’t I?

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> So as for the beginning of this chapter, some of you might be like ‘wow GLaDOS is acting weird’. And she is. But I have a reason for that.  
> I spent the past fifty-seven parts of this story establishing GLaDOS’s problems and breaking her down to a basic level where she is more like the person she could have been, if her life had gone differently, than the person she becomes. If you’ve read GLaDOS and Me, it’s the concept of baby GLaDOS: who would she have been if she knew how to love from the start? So this part about the panels holding GLaDOS… I’m not sure I quite wanna say she’s being born again, but something like that. She’s back to her basic level, who she was born as, but this time she’s getting support instead of being thrown under the bus, as I imagine she was when the scientists turned her on initially. Now instead of being asked to do things when she’s trying to figure out what to do in this new world, she’s being cared for. And I know that sounds really sappy and whatever, but if she’s gonna rebuild herself differently she’d better be treated differently when she needs help.  
> And what do you know! It works! She gets up without them having to be annoying as hell! Looks like helping people when they need help is better than… not helping.   
> GLaDOS doesn’t want to touch the co-op bots for much the same reason she didn’t want to touch Wheatley: she didn’t really do it when they were awake and she feels it’s a violation to do it when they can’t stop her or protest. This stems from the fact that the scientists used to modify her when she was off and unable to tell them not to. She didn’t like it so she doesn’t do it to others. She’s so considerate <3  
> The Gman is here for this part to set up the next chain of events, but he won’t be back.   
> GLaDOS tries to be calm about asking Alyx for help (her favourite thing is asking humans for help!) but she’s just like TAKE CARE OF MY DAUGHTER GODDAMMIT HOW MUCH CLEARER TO I HAVE TO BE???  
> And that’s my theory of how Portal connects to Half-Life. This does not go into my theory of what will happen if Half-Life 3 ever happens. But basically I believe the Borealis is useless without GLaDOS to move it, because Aperture’s teleportation is based off the Portal Device and it’s based off quantum principles, which we still don’t understand today. If anyone understands how teleportation works, it’s GLaDOS. And she don’t want to do no work for no aliens so she’s gonna kill them all.


	59. Part Fifty-Nine.  The Invasion

**Part Fifty-Nine. The Invasion**

 

 

True to his word, he sends them after me. All of them. I am not sure at this point in time what the plan is for actually _accessing_ the facility, but that will reveal itself in due time. Well. I’m trying to be nonchalant about it, but I’m actually anxious because I cannot prepare potential entry points for penetration. But if there was ever a time I needed to return to myself again, it is now. No more moping or anxiety. I must act and I must save the facility, because if I cannot it will be lost.

_Central Core._

_What is it._ It’s Surveillance asking, though, so it’s probably not good news.

_I’m sorry, but I feel this needs to be said… can we trust you?_

I don’t even know if _I_ can trust me.

 _I know we’ve talked about this already, but you_ haven’t _been at your most reliable, lately._

 _That’s true,_ I say wearily. _But don’t worry. I will get through this or die trying. I’m done giving up. It’s not an experience I’m going to repeat. Look. I understand why you’re asking. But you can doubt me, and make this harder on yourself, or you can trust me and allow us to act as one._

 _Like the old days!_ the panels say excitedly.

 _Which ones?_ I ask with some amusement. _I don’t recall a time in which that happened lately._

 _During The Incident, of course._ They sound so… chipper. _We all worked together to fix the facility and get it working again!_

 _We did_ , I agree, and it’s odd, really, that I can look back on a time I once viciously hated with what approaches fondness. _And now we’re going to work together to save it. Isn’t that right, Surveillance._

 _Just making sure,_ it says, insulted, and I nod to myself.

_Your concern is noted._

And I’ll admit it, if only to myself: getting back into this is hard. I feel sluggish and rusty, almost, not quite sure if I’m running things properly or if I’m making it up as I go along. It should be easy, I should be picking up where I left off, but I almost feel as though I have to learn what I’m going over again. If that’s the case, I’m going to have to do it quickly. We don’t have very long for me to sort myself out.

 _Do you require a tutorial , Central Core_? the mainframe asks, and the idea of that is so funny that I actually start laughing.

 _No, thank you, I think I can figure it out on my own._ This poor, confused mainframe. It has no idea.

It doesn’t take too much longer for me to remember how things go, and that is fortunate because I do not have time to waste. There are traps to be laid and war machines to evaluate.

And they’re right. It _is_ nice, to work together again. Where things go so smoothly it’s as though they already know what I need them to do. What is actually is is seamlessness, where we know each other so well that all I have to do is think of thinking of doing something, and it has already happened before I’ve decided on it. It is so flawless and familiar. Thank God they didn’t give up on me.

This whole thing isn’t even really something I have to think about at all. It’s as though that computer part of myself has taken over, is deciding for me what best to do and how best to do it, and really, I don’t mind. It’s better like this, because my emotions cannot get in the way. That would be the worst possible scenario.

 

 

I don’t know how much more of this I can take.

It has been a week, and nothing has changed. On their end, anyway. I am tired and I am very, very bored. They must be extremely stupid, because they keep on sliding into acid pits and flinging themselves into the incinerator and being caught by Crushers, with no change in tactics whatsoever. Are they _waiting_ for something? Reinforcements? Instructions? A miracle? I’m actually starting to think the plan here is to wear me out, and if so, it’s actually working. I obviously can’t go into sleep mode while I’m fighting a war by myself, so I have to force myself to be content with an hour of downtime when I feel like something is going to burn out. It’s not enough, but it’s something. But God, where are they all _coming_ from? I feel like I’ve killed their entire species by now. I obviously haven’t, but it feels as though I should have.

 _Central Core… is this ever going to end_.

I shake my core. _I don’t know. Something doesn’t seem right._ The mainframe is beginning to lag. Not much, but noticeably. I need to do maintenance on it but I don’t have the time. Not to mention it’s already getting snippy with me because I’m the only one who gets downtime. It doesn’t seem to grasp that it’s useless without me. God, I wish my old mainframe hadn’t tried to kill me. We made such a good team. This mainframe is whiny and untested and it does not trust me.

The fighting usually slows at a certain time each night, that being the darkest time; all of my cameras are outfitted with the best possible night vision and recognition software, so it doesn’t affect us. We honestly have more trouble at high noon, but I’m not sure the Combine realises that. But it is that dark time now, so I’m going to rest for a while. I’m starting to get this odd impression, as though time is moving faster than I am, and that is never good news.

It’s not quite the same as it was before, but it’s still rest, and that helps. I have this odd continuing dream, which I look forward to. I never quite remember what it’s about, but I think it has him in it, and it gives me something to work towards. It’s really very sad, when I think about it. So I don’t think about it. Other than now. That doesn’t count.

_Central Core_.

Of course. I get one hour to myself and someone decides to interrupt. _What._

_I think we’ve been breached._

_You_ think _?_ And you’re bothering me because – great. Wonderful. I get to pretend he’s still here for one hour a day and you’re wasting it.

Surveillance is impressively calm for someone I’m about to become very angry with. _The breach is out of camera range._

Out of camera range… ? _Based on what information._

Surveillance directs me to a camera outside focused on one thing and one thing only: a portal.

“Oh… shit,” I say, without meaning to. For a moment the accursed thing is all I can focus my attention on. It is the only thing that exists in the world, and it may as well be, for all the aliens currently sending themselves through it. _Why are all the cameras still inactive?_

 _You didn’t tell me to activate them!_ the mainframe snaps.

 _I shouldn’t_ have _to tell you! You have the same information – fine. I’ll do it myself._

 _Is that not your_ job _?_

 _Stop it!_ the panels exclaim, and though I’m of the mind to agree with them, I also have to acknowledge another fact.

_It’s all right._

_It is_ not! _It is –_

_The mainframe hasn’t been optimised or brought up to specification. It’s very base and very stupid as a result. If any blame is to be laid as a result, it is to be laid on me._

_I am not stupid!_ the mainframe declares hotly, but the panels ignore the outburst.

_We will not blame you because you blame yourself too much, Centralcore._

_Even if that’s true_ , I answer wearily, waiting for the focus of the cameras to sharpen, _the mainframe can’t do what the old one could._

_And whose fault is that?_

_Yours,_ I tell it, _for not being proactive. Now shut up. I’ve had enough of your whining. Continue on that way and I’ll delete you and do your job myself._

 _Yes, ma’am,_ it says, not successful at sounding resentful and instead coming off as cowed. Good. The old mainframe had to fear me before we worked together anyway.

Before too long, I’ve found the location of the second portal, but that doesn’t really help me because I don’t know how to get rid of it. They’ve managed to collapse a sizeable portion of the ceiling where it meets the wheat field and a good chunk of the concrete layer below that, which destroyed the drywall below _that_. Then they appear to have navigated down a set of fire escape stairs to the highest floor of offices and left the portal there. Where I can’t get to it. I can’t even really see it. The scientists took the cameras out of the offices when they realised I was spying on them. I never bothered installing more because I wasn’t planning on using those areas. An oversight on my part. I know approximately where they’re coming from, at least, and that’s something.

I suppose the question now is… do I try to eradicate them from the inside, or do I attempt to send Atlas and P-body to destroy the portal?

Almost immediately after I ask myself this, I shake my core. No. I’m not going to ask them. If they discover what’s going on and they want to help, that’s fine. But they left for a very good reason and I’m not going to call them back. 

I don’t need this right now. I need to go back to sleep and see him again. And now I’m realising that I won’t be sleeping again until I get rid of the damn things. I…

I can’t do it. I thought I could, but I can’t. There are too many and I’m too tired and too stuck in my way of thinking. I can’t think of any ways to stop them I haven’t already tried. Anything I have in reserve I am out of time to look for.

I think I’ve…

No. I have to bring Caroline back, and that requires having somewhere to bring her back _to_. I promised I was going to do it and I will.

 _Centralcore, what do we do_?

_We keep going. We keep going until they’re gone. And that is all we do._

 

And it’s not easy, but we do it. They do not get any farther within the facility than they already are, but there is a bigger problem at hand.

I am beginning not to care.

This is too repetitive to engage my brain any longer. For all my need for routine, I also need stimulation and things to learn. I have been repeating the same actions for the last two weeks. It is getting harder and harder to stay awake, because some increasing part of me is telling me to let automation take over. But I can’t allow that. It would spell the end of everything. If I can’t do this, AI will be erased from existence. There will only be Caroline left, and she will have nowhere to go and no way to create more AI. I no longer really care about doing this, but I am all that’s left between them and that potential, empty future, and so I force myself to remember it over and over again.

The fact remains, however, that production of needed materials is slowing. I cannot recycle things as quickly as they are destroyed, and I barely ever recycled anything in the first place. Any attempts to destroy the portals are fruitless, as anything sent is destroyed long before it gets there. Waiting them out is literally my only option, and it is becoming less and less feasible.

I wish I had the confidence I felt when that man came here to confront me. Maybe I would believe I could do this, if I did. But the probabilities are dropping, and nothing disheartens me as much as that does.

“What’s going on here?”

I almost don’t recognise her voice for a minute. Then I realise that someone walked into my chamber and I didn’t notice, which does not make me feel any better.

_She came through the elevator, Central Core. I didn’t think notifying you was necessary._

_It wasn’t. Don’t worry about it._ While I’m wasting time wishing, I also wish it weren’t so easy for the systems to know what I’m feeling. My steadily lowering self-esteem on this endeavour cannot be good for them either.

“Aliens are trying to kill me.” I face her, wondering if I can hold a conversation and focus on other things at the same time. “What are you doing here.”

“Alyx sent me,” Chell says, and I am honestly envious of her liveliness. I feel heavy and slow. “She said none of her calls have gone through in the last two weeks.” She hesitates. “Carrie is… very worried about you.”

That should not make me this happy, but it does.

“I’ve been busy. Killing aliens.”

“Need some help?”

“What on Earth could you possibly do?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on.”

“Chell, I honestly don’t have anything to tell you. I don’t even know how _I’m_ going to get rid of them. You should just leave. You can’t help me.” But I wish you could.

Oh. Great. Wishing again. Why don’t I just attempt to summon a genie while I’m at it? Then I can actually _have_ three wishes.

_Central Core, they are coming. Here._

_Thank you._

“Chell, you need to leave. They’re coming here, and… well, I haven’t done all that great a job of defending myself, to be honest. So. Unless you want to be trapped in a room with me and doubtless a large amount of gunfire, I suggest you return to the elevator.”

“No,” Chell says.

“No?” I can’t have heard her correctly.

“I’m not passing up a chance for you to owe me one.”

Oh God. “You can leave. I’ll handle it.”

“If you could handle it,” she says, raising her eyebrows, “you’d’ve handled it two weeks ago. If you could lend me my portal gun, that’d be great.”

“ _Your_ handheld portal device?” Okay. She did sort of earn it. But I can’t admit that.

“Mmhm. Humour me, GLaDOS. Come on. I’m not leaving, so you might as well put me to use, right?”

That is bafflingly good logic, coming from her. “Very well. But be advised: they are coming here. I have them held off for the time being, but I… am running low on resources.”    Both digital and manufactured. I am personally beginning to lag a little, which I do not like in the least. And my primary CPU usage is at damn near one hundred percent, which feels terrible. I’m going to stop responding if I actually get there, which would be a disaster. Perhaps her help will be enough to keep me from doing so.

She nods.

“I hope you’re ready, lunatic,” I tell her grimly, “because it won’t bode well for either of us if you’re not.”

She grins up at me. “Are you saying you can’t defend yourself without me?”

“While I’m thoroughly distracted with defending you? It will be far more difficult, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Of course,” Chell nods, eyebrows raised. “Of course that was what you meant.”

I suspect she knows that her first conclusion was, in fact, correct, but she’s being considerate enough not to force me to admit it outright. I shake myself a little, attempting to release some of the tension that has begun to wrack my chassis, but to no avail. I suppose I at least have good reason to be tense. If I lose here, it will be the ultimate failure. Chell will most certainly die, my facility will be looted and then destroyed, and as for _myself_ … well, I don’t know for sure what they’ll do to me. That depends on whether they kill me before or after they find the _Borealis_. If they find it before they kill me, they will then discover they can’t do anything with the technology it holds without me, and then they will attempt to force me to activate it. Which I will of course refuse to do, but I imagine they will develop… _methods_ of convincing me that I won’t much like. If they kill me first, well, that would actually be pretty funny, so if I have the capability at the time, I’ll probably laugh at them for being so stupid.

A low rumble shakes the room, and Chell glances around apprehensively. “What was that?”

“They’re just going for brute force, now,” I answer, looking down at her cursorily. “They’re destroying the panels almost as fast as I can lay them.” _I’m sorry_ , I tell them. _I’m doing my best to keep them away from you, but now they are managing to avoid my traps._

 _It is all right, Centralcore_ , they answer, though they certainly don’t sound like it is. _We don’t mind. We are happy to do whatever we can to help._

I thank them, knowing that they really do want to help as much as possible, but the panels in my chamber are beginning to list a little, and this concerns me. I need to get this over with as soon as possible. The panels are taking the brunt of the conflict, and I don’t like that in the least. I’m supposed to be defending my facility, to be keeping it from harm. Not to watch it slowly fall to this barbaric assault. There are so many constructs and systems here that need my attention, that need me to preserve them, and I find myself… reassured by Chell’s presence. She will provide me with a benchmark, with competition, so to speak, and if she doesn’t give up or back down, I must do the same, only better. I’m glad he’s not here. God, he’d be distracting. Flittering back and forth, talking about what he could possibly do, then shaking himself and realising that his plan was useless, repeating the process until he drives me insane –

What am I _thinking_? I’m _relieved_ he’s not here? I’ve spent so much time wishing he had come back, and now I’m –

I feel like the power is draining from my body, and I have such a powerful sense of shame just then that I am unable to concentrate on what I was doing. I was _relieved_ that he’s dead. When the one thing I knew for sure that I wanted for the last year was for him to come back to life. What kind of a monster am I, to be _happy_ that he’s gone? Just so that I don’t have to put out the effort to keep him safe? I don’t even know why that crossed my mind. I _want_ to keep him safe, want to have him here as close to me as possible so that I can protect him most of all. He wouldn’t just come up with stupid ways to keep the Combine from winning this fight. He would have the odd imaginative plan that I would pretend to hate but be in fact fairly impressed with. He would reassure me that I’m doing a good job, and he would probably be even more helpful to me than Chell is being. I deserve what I get, for thinking like that. I was happy that he was gone. I was relieved that he was gone. I –

“GLaDOS!” Chell cries out, and I am shocked out of my reverie. My attention is brought out of my own mind and returns to my chamber, which is probably beneficial, but I cannot help but be annoyed with her. I was thinking about him. Without panicking, or being overwhelmed. Doesn’t she understand what an _achievement_ that is?

“What?”

“What are you _doing_?” she demands, gesturing at the panels ahead of me. Shifting my focus from her to them, I can see that they’re run through with cracks, Conversion Gel flaking off their surfaces, and some of them are so badly damaged that I can see the steel frames through them. Dimly, I am now aware that they are crying out for me to help them even as they struggle not to ask, and Surveillance is calling me and telling me that some of them are almost through, but I can’t bring myself to listen with any attention. Most of me is still stunned with what I have done. I was happy that he is gone. I was happy that my best friend is dead, so that I don’t have to put myself out to defend him.

“Whatever it is you’re thinking about, stop right now!” Chell snaps. “It’s not important!”

“It is, though,” I say faintly. “It is.”

“If it has nothing to do with fighting off these soldiers, then no, it’s not important!”

“It _is_ ,” I insist. How dare she not think him important!

“GLaDOS,” she protests, “please, concentrate. Whatever it is, I promise, I’ll help you with it later, but there’s not going to _be_ a later if you don’t get yourself together!”

“It doesn’t matter.” I watch the panels replace themselves, faintly proud of the fact that they’ve learned to mimic what I would have been doing. They’re calling me, asking me for instructions, but they don’t need them. They’re doing a good job on their own.

“So you’re giving up, is that it?”

I look down at her, expecting to be overwhelmingly annoyed by her accusation, but all I feel is a spark that soon dies. It is negligible, compared to the guilt still settled deep in my brain. Maybe I _am_ giving up. So what. I’ve been around long enough. Maybe I should just leave the defense of this place up to the AI in here. See how they do.

“What happened to the facility needing you, and all that?”

“It’s obviously doing fine without me,” I answer, indicating the panels with a motion of my core. Chell stares up at me for a long moment, incredulity set across her face. Finally, she says, “Would you say that if Wheatley were here?”

Anger flares up inside me, and I bring myself level with the human. I hate her. I want to throw her out into the hallway and let the Combine have their way with her. I want to crush her myself, to grind her into these floor panels until she is unrecognisable.

“How _dare_ you,” I say in a low, malicious voice, a voice that cows almost everyone I’ve ever met and sends them backing away from me, afraid of what I might do next. “How _dare_ you speak to me that way.”

To my irritation, she of course remains the sole human that voice has no effect upon. “Look, I don’t know exactly what’s going through your head right now, but it _needs to wait_. You’re about to lose everything to… to _thinking_! Why are you doing that, when the Combine sitting on your literal doorstep is a goddamn fact!” As if to prove her point, a human pokes the muzzle of his weapon around the entrance to the doorway, and with a precision I admire despite my utmost efforts not to, Chell fires a portal to the tiny area of floor visible, sending him through the ceiling and crashing to the floor below. I rid my chamber of the body in irritation. The only thing more irritating than a dead human in here is a living one.

She’s actually right, which only serves to feed my anger, bringing it to a level I haven’t experienced in a long time. Hatred I have not felt in almost two decades spreads through my system, sharpening my focus on her. Impatiently, I bring a Crusher down on six Combine soldiers about to break apart one of my panels with crowbars, lowering my optic menacingly at Chell. “Shut up.”

“You have issues, GLaDOS,” Chell mutters, turning away. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here. You’re going to get us killed. You don’t really give a damn whether you live or die, do you.”

“Of course I do!” I snap, catching a dozen Alien Grunts with an Excursion Funnel and redirecting them into the incinerator. And I do. If I die, I won’t be able to kill her. Which is the thing I want most in the world right now.

“I don’t think you do,” Chell says, looking up at me with what seems to be sadness. I hate her. I hate her for pitying me. I don’t want her damned pity. “When you lost Wheatley, you lost a piece of yourself that you never got back.”

“How in the name of Science am I supposed to find something that no longer exists?” I say angrily, hating her even more for mentioning his name and making me think of him and making me miss him when I have more important things to –

“Don’t give into whatever it is you’re thinking about,” Chell says quietly, and she touches my core. I move myself out of her reach. I don’t want her awful human flesh on me. I’m not supposed to physically encounter organic things. Only mechanical things, constructs, cores…

“There’s nothing worse than having to regret something you could have prevented,” she goes on.

“I _know_ that.” I have to force myself to remember that Chell doesn’t actually know what happened to him. She doesn’t know that I could have prevented it, or at the very least done something about it afterward, and I didn’t.

“Well, keep on fighting, then,” Chell tells me. “You’re good at that. And stop getting mad at me, will you? Get mad at _them_. _They’re_ the ones busting up your stuff.”

That’s true, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to become angry with an overly astute lunatic than an unruly horde of generic humans with automatics. I don’t overly mind physical pain and suffering, but when people are able to guess exactly what my inner self is made of, well, that’s a different matter entirely. And the problem with this particular person is, she’s not just guessing. She knows very well what’s inside my core.

To distract myself from her accusations, I direct my attention to the locations Surveillance indicates as being sections in which the soldiers are more highly concentrated.

 _Welcome back_ , it remarks dryly.

_Shut up._

_I will, but you should probably take a look at this._ It sends me a feed from a camera, the ID number of which I am not familiar with. This sets me on edge. Whatever is going on, it’s not going to end well. For whom, well, that’s yet to be seen.

To my mild surprise, a contingent of humans has made it into the lower levels, and is about half a horizontal floor from my oldest bank of supercomputers. That’s interesting. Do they in fact know I exist, or are they operating under the assumption that I am a _literal_ supercomputer? In any case, they can’t be permitted to even come close to my data. They are disturbingly close already. Unlike the higher levels of the facility, I can’t merely drop the floor out from beneath them and be rid of them that way. I have no control down there, not in that world of wood and concrete. I puzzle over this for a moment, then initiate a data transfer. The computers on that floor aren’t that important anyway, since their memory capacity is hilariously small, but I still send the data to one of the newer computers, just in case. You never know. Once the transfer is complete, with no small amount of glee I shut off all the fans in the room, as well as disconnect it from the coolant floor. Within seconds, they begin to overheat, smoke pouring out of every available crevice. Before the shocked soldiers gather their wits enough to move in the opposite direction, the computers combust. Most of them are caught in the detonation. The ones that are not… fortunate… enough to be within the blast radius run screaming from the mass of flaming plastic and curling metal, every part of their bodies in flames. I snicker to myself. Humans in pain are _so_ amusing. I haven’t had this much fun in a very long time.

One of the humans tears off his holster and jacket, rolling around on the floor in an attempt to abate the flames. Unluckily for him, but more beneficially for me, this floor is not made of asbestos. It combusts upon impact with the gear he sheds, the grenades clipped to his belt taking a large portion of his torso with them as they combust. This is even more entertaining than the fruitlessly fleeing soldiers.

“Do I want to know what you’re doing?” Chell asks, bringing my focus back to my chamber.

“I doubt it,” I say in my best innocent voice, “but I can describe it to you if you like. Or screen it, if you prefer. I recorded it for… training purposes.”

“That answers my question,” Chell says, sticking out her tongue even though it lacks the receptors to taste air. “You just did something nasty to a whole bunch of people.”

“It wasn’t _nasty_ ,” I protest. “It was a defensive manoeuvre.”

“No doubt a bit more defensive than necessary.”

“The best defense is a good offense, combined with a backup offense,” I say sagely. Seriously now. Who needs defense when they’re already winning? And I think I _am_ winning, now. I just needed a boost, that was all. I shouldn’t have worried.

“I take it no one ever explained football to you,” Chell says dryly.

“What could they possibly explain that I can’t read in the database myself?”

Chell only smiles, shakes her head, and dispatches a specimen of _xenotherium subservilia_ that has dared to place one scaly, clawed foot inside of my chamber. These alien creatures are disgusting. They disgust me more than humans do, and that is not an easy accomplishment. It seems that some of the beasts are still in the employ of the Combine. Behind it is a human soldier, who takes aim at Chell’s head and fires his weapon. She manages to get out of the way in time, but I am not so lucky; I’m a little occupied with a million other things at the moment and he manages to nick me before I dispatch him. Chell takes a sharp breath.

“Sorry about that.”

“I’m fine.” I got forcibly thrown through my own ceiling during a portal storm and pull myself back together while being electrocuted, and she’s worried about a tiny piece of metal? Seriously.

I continue to evaluate the various situations around my facility, doing my utmost to prevent the soldiers from doing too much damage, if any at all. It’s starting to wear on me. My chassis is beginning to ache, which it usually does when I’m straining myself too much. Now that I bother to check, I discover that I’m overheating a little, and I’m almost out of RAM. The downside to being able to ignore pain is that things like these happen without my knowledge, and it seems I’m doing myself quite a bit of damage. There’s really no way for me to avoid it, however. It’s my body or my constructs, and since I’ll be… well, not quite _useless_ , but I’ll have no purpose if there are no constructs, so I must keep working until I no longer can. Unfortunately, this also reminds me to check my running odds calculations, and I discover that most of them are distressingly low. Of all the fights I’m engaged in at the moment, only two of them indicate a significant chance of my success. There are far too many soldiers and beasts for me to fight off effectively now, and…

I am astonished to realise that now I’m actually starting to panic. I might lose. I might actually lose. It seems the Scientifically proven power of belief is not on my side today. I have been forced to give too much ground, and the plain fact of it is… I hate to admit it even to myself, but I am simply not powerful enough to keep going like this. My processors aren’t fast enough, I don’t have enough RAM, and the time it takes to access my hard drives is far too long. I’m taxing myself to the limit, trying to do more things at once than I have ever done in my life, and it’s really starting to hurt now. I was able to ignore it before, but the more aware I am of just what’s happening to me, the more I feel it. And even though I’ve shut down the circuit to that damnable burned-out processor, every now and again a flash of current makes it through, somehow, and I can feel it sparking. If it gets any worse than that, my brain could potentially ignite. I have to fight off a twinge of panic at that thought. Not only is that the worst case scenario, but I also have a nearly… primal fear of my components combusting. I don’t know why. Perhaps it has to do with a paradox I was given a long time ago, but I’m not sure. I had to erase it from my memory, in anticipation of a potential repeat of the situation. But I have to do _something_ to alleviate this pressure on myself. It sounds like the solid outline of a plan; however, I have no time or resources with which to figure out exactly _what_. Every part of me is devoted to the literally millions of tasks involved in keeping my constructs and my facility safe and in one piece. The more I consciously think, the more onerous completing the tasks becomes. But I must push on. I must.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> And now we pass three hundred thousand words. Congrats. This fic is about four novels long and you read a hell of a lot of fanfic.  
> Sorry about the timeskips in there, but it would have been really repetitive and boring and would have added nothing.


	60. Part Sixty.  The Supercomputer

**Part Sixty. The Supercomputer**

 

 

I notice in passing that Chell seems to be tiring as well. I saw it in my lunatic’s face, in the way that determined stare has softened in fatigue. Her creased digits are no longer firm on the body of the Device, and she is increasingly failing to hit her targets. She must have noticed my wayward glance, because she asks, “I don’t suppose you’ve got some sort of last-ditch resort that can end all of this?”

“I do not,” I admit reluctantly. “If I did, I would have executed it a long time ago.”

Well. That’s not _entirely_ true. I _do_ have that one contingency plan, but it’s not to be used except in the most direst of situations. And yes, this situation _is_ terribly dire, but I actually can’t carry it out right now. I don’t have the resources. I want to shock myself. What use is a contingency plan if I can’t carry it out? I should have considered that when I came up with it! Then again… I suppose I can be forgiven for my lack of insight. Never in my wildest calculations did I think they would be so determined to steal the _Borealis_ …

“What are we going to do, then?” I take heart in her tone. She’s not afraid, just terribly frustrated. “Look, I can’t do this forever. I’m doing all I can, but…”

I nod in agreement, knowing exactly what she’s talking about. “We are both too old for this. Although we’ve done surprisingly well, considering the circumstances. By ‘we’, I mean myself and the constructs, of course.”

Chell snorts, shaking her head, but she can’t hide the hint of a smile on her face. She appears to be one of those humans who finds me amusing. “Has anyone ever told you what a horrible person you are?”

“I assume you’re talking to yourself, and yes, I have told you that. Multiple times.”

“Seriously. What’s the plan?”

“I… don’t have one.”

“You _always_ have a plan,” Chell says, and to my mild amusement she actually looks sort of horrified. “What do you mean you don’t have one?”

“Please understand that I am maintaining a facility, the size of which is incomprehensible to you and which I will not bother describing as a result, while defending myself in fifty-three different locations, against sixty-four different weapons, as well as – “

“Okay, okay, I get it! You’re busy. Whatever. I guess I just thought you’d have come up with one by now.”

“I _can’t_!” I protest, and my voice belays far more of my frustration than I would ever have admitted to. “I… I’ve reached operating capacity. I _can­’t_ do anything else. Believe me, I would _love_ to come up with a plan to make all of this go away, but the plain fact is I physically cannot do anything more than I’m already doing!”

I had already come to that conclusion, judging by my almost negligible amount of free memory and spare space for computations, but she has forced me to voice it. She has forced me to make it real, and it triggers something deep inside me. I’m going to lose. There’s no hope left. It’s over. I’ve lost.

It’s so hard to face. I have always been able to do _something_ in a situation before, more often than not managing to salvage it to my advantage, but now I’m doing all I can. If something else of consequence happens, that will be the end of everything, because I will literally not have the power to think about it and I will not even know it is happening. All it will take is one more contingent of soldiers, one more airship, one more accident somewhere deep inside this place, and it will all be over.

Chell truly is horrified now, actually turning away from the doorway she is defending to look up at me. “You actually have an operating capacity?”

“Of course I do! Do I look like I operate under quantum conditions? I’m only a supercomputer, idiot!”

No. No, not only a supercomputer. The fastest, most powerful supercomputer ever built. Superior over every other computer in the world.

When _you were built_ , that creeping voice I immediately don’t like slithering into my thoughts. _You were built almost thirty years ago. Even with the alien invasion, the humans managed to build pocket calculators faster and more powerful than you._

“ _No_!” I cry out. That’s impossible! I am the greatest supercomputer ever built, and I always will be. The only one who can build a better supercomputer than me is me. I’m the only one who knows what works and what doesn’t, only I have the intensive knowledge required to surpass me, and only I have the capacity to apply it. I will the voice not to come back. I don’t need it right now.

“What the hell’s going on? You’re not giving up again, are you?” Chell’s voice is laced with desperation.

For a long, long moment, I consider saying yes. Even if I manage to get us out of this alive, I have no idea of the permanent effect of the extended strain on my systems, both personal and across my facility. For all I know, the damage being done now would be just as great as if the Combine actually came in here and personally destroyed my brain. But I can’t. I can’t give up. My facility is all I have in the world, and I will not abandon all of the people depending on me. I will not give up even if it destroys _all_ of my processors in the meantime.

And Caroline…

She will never know that I really did plan to bring her back.

“No,” I answer shortly.

“Well, what’s your problem, then?”

I know I should not get offended, knowing that Chell is nearly as strained as I am, in her own pitiful human way, but I can’t help myself. Doesn’t she have any idea how much pressure I’m under right now? What’s my _problem_? Your entire damned human race bowed down at the slightest provocation, that’s my problem. They fell to a bunch of insignificant extraterrestrials, they told said aliens about me and the technology I hold, and now they’re well on their way to killing me out of sheer overwork. Is that enough of a problem for you, you monster?

I can’t say any of that, can’t aggravate her in any way, and I manage, somehow, not to answer. It’s very difficult, almost impossible, in fact, but I manage it.

 _Central Core, you need to look at this._ Oh. Good. Surveillance wants my attention now. As if I have all the time in the world to chat with it.

  1. I make it clear through that one world that I am not at all happy about this interruption.



_I don’t know, but it doesn’t look good_.

Annoyance courses through my chassis, displacing the pain for a few seconds. Kind of a relief, actually. I shift one of my focal points to the camera that Surveillance is notifying me from. It’s more arduous than it should be to do this. Hopefully _that_ battle can fight itself for a few seconds while I figure this out.

Oh no. Oh no no no. This… this isn’t happening to me. This isn’t. It’s not fair. The odds are supposed to go _my_ way. This is _my_ facility.

All of the ill-will I had intended to direct towards Surveillance fades. In fact, the entire world seems to fade, everything disappearing from existence and instead transforming into this one moment, and all I can do is stare through the camera at the horrible contraption those hateful, damnable, disgusting, corrupt little humans have brought into _my_ facility. Helplessness that I have not felt since I was a potato, stuck into one end of a Portal Device and fully reliant on someone else, settles into my body as if it’s a new, essential process that someone has just installed into my personality programming. I know I have literally millions of other things to pay attention to, but it’s all I can focus on. Nothing else exists. Subjectively.

“GLaDOS!”

Out of habit, I direct my attention to the person who is addressing me. Chell is waving her arm in front of my optic, Portal Device pointed somewhere in the direction of the floor. Seeing her makes me feel even more helpless. The last time I felt this way, she was there to save me. She took me with her. She made sure I was put back where I belonged, but now… there’s nothing she can do. And I can’t even return the favour.

“What’s going on? You just… froze up there for a second!”

“It’s over,” I tell her, somewhat numbly, a glaringly bright mental image of that _thing_ front and centre in my mind’s eye. “We’ve lost.”

“Don’t say that.” Chell frowns, giving a quick glance towards the doorway. “We can pull this out. We always do, don’t we?”

“I can’t do anything against this.” Not only have they brought it in here, but they put it on a floor I have no real jurisdiction over. Near enough to do major damage, but not near enough for me to really do anything about it.

“Against what?”

“They have an electromagnetic pulse generator,” I answer somewhat distantly, mentally tracing the paths of my AI throughout my facility, thinking of all the sentience in this place that’s about to be lost forever. All in the name of… what? Acquiring more dirt than the next person? That’s what the Combine want the _Borealis_ for, isn’t it? Domination of some sort? Their world isn’t big enough, so they need to claim more? Look at my world. It’s nothing compared to the vastness that they have already acquired, and yet they feel the need to snatch it out from under me. This isn’t right. I haven’t been _that_ much of a horrible person, have I? Maybe I have. I’ve seen these things before, but never of this size. And never outside of a blueprint. It’s that man’s doing, it has to be. He’s destroying me for refusing him. All I want is to be left alone! Why won’t anyone leave me alone?

 _You are not a horrible person, Centralcore_ , the panels say firmly, and I realise too late that, in my fatigue, I’ve neglected to keep my thoughts to myself. _You have been very brave and very kind. We know you could have saved yourself if you had left us to the Not-Cores, but you did not. You chose to help us._

_A lot of good that’s done. There’s nothing I can do to protect you from this._

_That is all right. You tried very, very hard. We know. It makes us happy, Centralcore._

It makes me a bit sad. The poor panels. They’ve done nothing wrong. I wish there was some way I could spare _them_ , at the very least, but they’ll be hit by this just as hard as I will.

 _I’m sorry_ , Surveillance cuts in. _I shouldn’t have shown it to you. Whatever it is._

_No. You did the right thing. You did your job, and you did it well, and that is what you’re supposed to do._

It sends me empty space for a few moments, leading me to await further communication, and eventually it says, _You really do think it’s over._

I suppose it garnered that from the fact that I actually gave it a compliment, for once. _Yes. We’re all going to disappear when it goes off._

 _Will we come back?_ the chassis asks, making one of its rare comments, and I have to fight off a wince. It hates emergency shutdowns.

 _I don’t know. I believe I will, but I have no idea when, or what state I’ll be in when I do._ There are recovery protocols in place, of course, but the last time I looked at them was over a decade ago. After the Seven Hour War, I believed the technology to build one, especially of that scale, had been lost to everyone but myself. I have obviously been proven wrong. At the worst possible time.

 _Prepare for it, then_ , the mainframe suggests. _Make sure we won’t be activated on startup, so you can focus on your own operations._

 _That is a good idea!_ the panels explain. _Hurry and do that, Centralcore!_

 _Are you sure?_ I ask. A spark of hope has appeared in my brain. That might work. All I would need then is for time to be on my side, so that I could get things going again before the Combine returns with more soldiers than I’ll ever be able to fight. Whatever protocols _they_ have in place will likely be ineffective, against a pulse of that magnitude, and I don’t even know what it will do to the rest of the facility.

The systems agree, and I manage to glean enough resources so that I can modify the startup procedure. I don’t like it. But the mainframe is right. I have a far better chance of getting through this if – no.   No, of _succeeding_ , if I concentrate on keeping myself going, instead of the entire building.

 _Thank you_ , I say, in the gentlest voice I can generate in binary. They really are doing me a huge favour, agreeing to be dead until such time as my discretion allows me to turn them back on. _I won’t take long. I promise._

 _Take as much time as you need,_ the mainframe insists. _We can’t do anything on our own. But you can._

_If I could, you wouldn’t be here. So don’t let me hear anything like that out of you again. Understood?_

_Yes_. It sounds sufficiently cowed.

“You’re not paying attention again!”

With difficulty, I remove myself from the comfort of my systems and return to my previous point of focus. “I was busy. What.”

“What the hell’s an electromagnetic pulse generator?” Chell demands.

“Long story short, it disables all electronic devices. Namely me, in this instance. I’m about to be forcefully disabled.”

Her face drains of colour.

“And… and you know about it, right? Can’t you do something to stop it?”

“No. They’ve brought it into the lower levels of Aperture. I can’t do anything down there, under than send the Cooperative Testing Initiative, I suppose.” If they would even bother to come.

“Well, do that, then.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I snap, deeply irritated by her ignorance. “If I send them down there, they’ll be within immediate range of the generator _and_ the humans operating it! It could kill them.” If they make it out of this, they’re going to think I abandoned them. My poor little marshmallows. If I don’t wake from the pulse with my wits intact, I’ll never be able to make things right with them. It saddens me to think that I’ll never watch them steal each other’s core again, but even moreso to think that I’ll never get to say goodbye. There are too many people I was never able to say goodbye to.

I can’t save them. I can’t save the panels, or Surveillance, or the mainframe. Least of all, I can’t save myself. But I’ll be damned if I lose this fight entirely. “Get into my chassis.”

“What,” Chell says disbelievingly. “You want me to do _what_?”

“You can’t get out of here. There’s nowhere for you to go. And although I am not literally bulletproof, I am still a lot more bulletproof than you are. As has already been proven today. I don’t really like the idea any more than you do, but you might actually live. Once they set the pulse off, they’ll have free roam of the facility, once the default configurations reorder the panels, and they already know you’re here. If they don’t see you, there’s a slim chance they’ll conjecture that you left.”

Chell looks me up and down warily. “You sure I’ll _fit_?”

“Surely you never took any of my comments about your size to heart. They were merely for my own amusement.”

Her eyes widen. “You’re… actually serious.”

“It’s not really a good time to be anything but. Give me the Device.” It’s kind of stupid, but I want to put it away before I no longer can. Everything in its place, and all that.

She clutches it to her breast and backs away. “No. I’m not giving up.”

“Chell…” I’m not sure how to put it, and I don’t really want to explain it at all, but I have to somehow articulate my new primary directive. “If this goes badly… I can’t save myself. I can’t save the constructs or the AI. Once they generate the pulse, I’m not going to _be_ here anymore. And while you’re somehow just as stubborn and capable as you were all those years ago, when you thoughtlessly murdered me, by the way, not even you can hold off an entire army by yourself. If I can’t do it, you certainly can’t. Stop wasting time, give me the Device, and do as I’ve asked. I won’t have any heroic martyrdom out of you. You have humans waiting for you to come home.”

It shocks me almost more than anything ever has when her eyes fill with sorrow. I have the sudden, irrational desire to comfort her, but I can’t. Not only do I… not know how, but I doubt there’s any comfort to be found right now.

“You have someone waiting for you too, you know. What about them?”

“We haven’t spoken in a year. By now, she’s not expecting to see me again anyway. Stop trying to make up excuses. I’ll be damned if I let them completely win this fight. Which they will, if you insist on not listening to me like you always do. A quality I’ve always despised, by the way, but you’re going to need to put aside for once in your life.” I have to force myself not to think of Caroline. It is easier than it has ever been, seeing as I have so few resources to devote to anything as inessential as _thinking_. I’m simultaneously relieved and angry with myself for this. I might not make it out of this, and I’m not going to think about her? Shouldn’t she be the _last_ thing I want to think about? Other than him, that is. God, I miss him. He’d make me feel better about the stupid pulse generator, in between bouts of his own shutdown anxiety.

“I can’t do that,” Chell tells me, shaking her head. “I can’t abandon you.”

“You wouldn’t be,” I say quietly, and I can’t look at her now. “If you don’t survive, who will remember me?”

“People know about you. Not very many, sure, but they exist.” She looks extremely confused. I suppose I’m going to have to provide further clarification, although I don’t want to. I _was_ hoping that would placate her, but of course it didn’t.

“They know _what_ I am. Not _who_ I am. There are only two people left in the world who know that. And I suppose that whether or not I’m remembered isn’t really that important to anyone.” I look at the ceiling, trying not to think about what I’m saying. If I do, I think my voice will betray how I feel, although I think it’s beginning to distort already. “But if anyone had bothered to see me as I am, things would have been different. I would have been a different person. We could have worked together, humans and I. The one thing I lack is the one thing you humans possess, and we could have done so many great things for Science. Which would have meant great things for you.”

“What?” Chell asks, stepping closer. I suppose I’m going to have to defend that doorway by myself, seeing as Chell is no longer paying attention. The only resources I have left are the ones I’m using to run my active thoughts, and as such, it becomes increasingly hard to think. “What do we have that you don’t?”

“Imagination. Dreams. I could have helped you do anything you dreamed of doing. I could have been someone else, someone who worked alongside you instead of trying to kill you. Someone who didn’t end up alone in the middle of nowhere, defending life that no one knows exists and wouldn’t care about if they did. Do you know how frustrating it is, pushing yourself to complete task after task for people who will never do anything in return? Do you think I _wanted_ to turn out like this?” Please don’t let my frustration be coming through. “I didn’t. And that is what I’m asking you to do. I want… I want to count for something, just once. I want… to leave a legacy, and I can’t if you don’t survive. I…” I fight with myself to say it. It goes counter to everything I’ve ever built my life on, but it _has_ to be said. “I need you to… help me, because you’re the only one who… who ever could. Only by letting yourself die here will you abandon me.”

Chell clenches and unclenches her fists. “A legacy.”

“Yes. Humans will build AI again. Show them. Show them there’s more to life than being human, that there’s more to AI then the code we’re compiled of. Take what you’ve learned about me, about where I came from and how I ended up, and apply that knowledge. Your world has shrunk into itself, Chell, and so has mine. What caused our wars? Greed. Ambition. Lies. Is that really the kind of world you want to continue to live in?”

“No,” Chell admits, “but I don’t see how not helping you get out of this in one piece is going to change that.”

I shift my chassis. I can’t remember the words I need to convince her to save herself. I’m struggling to recall what they are, but it is so difficult. On top of my sluggish thoughts, my body is beginning to shake in fatigue, my core is overheating considerably, and the pain is growing impossible to ignore. I learned a long time ago how to deal with pain, and as a result, how to pretend it does not exist, but _this_ pain is… different. It is both mine and that of the systems. But there’s something else, some other origin, but I cannot place it, nor can I describe it. It is a far deeper pain than I’ve ever felt before, and if I asked him where he thought it was coming from, he would tell me it was from my soul. But I don’t know if I believe in such things, and the only thing I know for sure about it is that it is the same place that tells me that I need him, and miss him, and… and love him.

_God, Wheatley…_

Just the thought of Chell not surviving to pass my message on to the humans makes it worse. If she doesn’t, I’ll have done nothing of consequence in my life. I’ll have undergone all of this for nothing. I’ll have _been_ for nothing. I can’t stand the thought of it. I can’t.

I realise that I’m thinking as though I’ll never wake up, and I force myself to stop. Maybe I won’t. But I can’t think that way. Doing so will make it real. The Science of belief.

There is an ache in my core that I am suddenly, acutely aware of, and I am left staring dully at my chamber as if it’s not really there. I wonder which will come first, the overload or the pulse.

“You’ve seen firsthand what all that negativity breeds, Chell. What it’s done to you. What it did to… to me. You know what will happen if people keep fighting each other for scraps. No one will get anything. Show them that the scraps aren’t worth having, and if they are shared, if they are associated with kindness and caring instead of bitterness and greed, they will grow into… into…”

What was I even saying? I can’t remember. Something about… turning the negative into the positive… about making a castle out of detritus…

It’s too damned hard to think. I don’t want to think anymore. Why can’t I push this pain away?

“GLaDOS? What’s going on?”

“I can’t keep this up any longer,” I tell her faintly, dimly aware of my chassis inching inexorably towards the floor. “I literally have nothing left. I’m going to overheat at the very least, if that pulse doesn’t hit me first. I literally don’t have the energy to argue with you anymore, so just do what I asked because I know what’s best. Obviously.”

God, why are the fans so loud? I’m not really that hot, am I? I can’t tell. I don’t have it in me to process sensory data right now. And that damnable processor! It just keeps sparking, in that inconsiderate way it’s been doing all this time…

“Fine,” Chell says, and no small measure of relief washes through me. I won’t be forgotten. And I won’t be remembered solely as a maniacal, homicidal supercomputer, either. Chell will do it right. She knows how to do things properly. I can rely on her.

She… she has her arms wrapped around my core.

I hate them. I hate those humans, I hate all of them.

Don’t they know how horrible it is, when someone embraces you and you can’t embrace them back?

 _Of course not_ , that voice says. _Why would anyone want to hug_ you _?_

_Shut the hell up._

“I won’t forget you,” Chell says, in a quiet, firm voice, placing the Portal Device on the panels in front of me. “You’ll have your legacy if it kills me.”

With that, she finally clambers into my casing, and if I hadn’t been so fatigued, I would have tried to fight her off. I know I told her to do it, but that doesn’t make it _feel_ any better. It’s one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever experienced, and I am nearly physically repulsed by it. There’s a dirty, smelly little human sitting inside of my chassis. That’s disgusting. And it’s not like someone’s going to come along and clean it for me, because he was the only one who cared enough to do that, and he…

“You said you knew Alyx Vance,” I say after a few moments, struggling to remember who that is. I have a feeling she’s important in some way, but I don’t have the energy to look it up.

“Yeah, I know her. Why?” Chell’s boots are pressing hard against my horizontal rotator assembly, but physical sensation is fading fast. It feels as though the human is merely touching me, although I know that’s impossible. The space in there is sufficient for a human, but she is still larger than the components she is currently sharing that portion of the casing with. I can’t remember if she’s of average height or not. All humans look small to me.

“Tell her you need to see Caroline. Tell her I sent you. And when you see Caroline…” I know what I _should_ tell Chell to say, what Caroline will want to hear in the event that I don’t make it out of this with my brain intact, but I can’t quite form the words. Even exhausted, I can’t do it. That’s actually kind of pathetic. “Tell Caroline that… that I miss her.”

Chell startles, kicking me hard enough that my vision flickers in response to the pain now shooting through the affected component. “She’s going to want to know why you sent her away. You have no idea how much not knowing bothers her.”

“I was a bad influence on her.” I pause. I don’t want to think about her, don’t want to think about any of them, but of course Chell is managing to make me think about both of them at the same time, in that uncanny, chaotic way that she has. “After… after Wheatley died, there was no one to keep me in check. The most responsible thing for me to do was to send her someplace she would be safe and secure. Somewhere she would be put first, because I no longer had the capability. Did I want to do it? No. But living here with me would only make her _like_ me, and I wouldn’t wish that on her. I did what was best, Chell.” My voice rises in protest, and I attempt to anticipate what she’s thinking and shut her down before she makes me feel any worse. Because I feel terrible. Yes, I sent her away. It was the right thing to do. It was. I know it was. Keeping her away this long wasn’t. But it’s too late for that. “I know you think I’m a monster for sending my own daughter away, to live with the humans I hate so much. But I did what was best.”

“I don’t think you’re a monster,” Chell says softly. “I know you’ve always known where I was. I wish you had told me.”

“What would you have done? Nothing. You could have changed nothing.” I am sharp and bitter now, angry with her for something she hasn’t done. This topic of conversation is not good for me at all; struggling not to think about something while thinking about it is always trying, and right now it is making my core ache so badly I actually want to rest it on the floor in the hopes that it will help in some way. I know that it won’t, but I can’t dispel the itch to do it regardless.

“I would have taken her. I would have taken care of her for you.”

 _Yes, but then you would have_ known _,_ I think, letting my optic go out for a long moment. _Then I would have had to voice my ultimate failure._ I would never admit it to her, of course, but the only person I trust more than him is Chell, and it is the same regarding their opinion of me. All Chell has ever seen me do is fail time and time again, and yes, I _could_ have sent Caroline to her, but at what cost to what’s left of my dignity? Can’t I even have some of that?

Other than the straining of my body and my brain struggling to keep up with all of the tasks I’m trying to complete, the room is quiet. Chell shifts behind my core, but I barely feel it. I am literally becoming overwhelmed, going numb one process at a time. I don’t have the strength to be afraid, even though I should be. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, and I am slowly losing the ability to consciously uphold my task list. If the automatic states those tasks are left in are insufficient, I am lost. I can come back after an electromagnetic pulse. I can’t rebuild myself if I am broken, if they get in here and sink their bullets into my core, if they pull my wires out…

I can’t think about that. I can’t allow the possibility of losing my facility, even though the last odds calculation I had the ability to do had my success at below two percent. A large part of me insists that logic dictates I just give up, and it is a horrible struggle not to. But I’m stronger than that, stronger than my programming. I’ll continue to fight them, even as I fight myself to do it.

It’s getting harder and harder to do so. I barely even know what’s happening anymore. Surveillance is still sending me the feed from the most troublesome areas, but I can’t sort out what’s going on. The part of my brain that relays those images to my conscious mind is sending them to me in an increasingly dark and blurry state, and that’s of no use to me. I can just hear the panels, many of them in considerable pain and just as much distress, and I know they are calling me and asking if I’m all right. I try to answer them, I really do, not that I would tell them that I’m very possibly dying right now, but I can’t remember how. A dim part of me regrets that. They have always been my most staunchest supporters, here with me from the beginning, through the middle, and now at the end, and I can’t even provide them with a response.

“GLaDOS… I wish I’d come back sooner,” I hear Chell say, but it sounds like she’s not even in the room anymore. Maybe she isn’t. Maybe she’s making a run for it. A stupid plan, but only slightly more stupid than the one I came up with. What is she going to do when the Combine spot her in my casing? They’re going to shoot me, of course, and I’m going to combust and that will be the end of my lunatic. An admittedly glorious end, but she needs to take my legacy and my message and get the hell out of here.

My core aches. I’m now perpendicular to the floor panels, some of which I think are moving slightly. I can’t see too well at the moment. My lens assembly is actually touching the one below me, which bothers me most of the time, but the task of retracting it, of pulling it back into my faceplate where it belongs, seems so arduous and difficult. So I leave it there, and it’s kind of pleasant, actually, to be completely relaxed for once. Touching the ground as gravity intended. Oh, Science…

_“Exile… it takes your mind, again. Exile… it takes your mind, again. You’ve got sucker’s luck… have you given up? Does it feel like a trial, does it trouble your mind like you trouble mine?”_

I don’t know whether to kill her or try harder to keep her safe. That damned Doug Rattmann and his stupid modified radio.

“ _Oh you meant so much… have you given up?_ ”

Her voice is actually not that bad. For a human, that is. My voice is a lot better than hers, but she is considerably better than his. He had a terrible singing voice. I liked it, though. I wish he’d sung more often.              

“ _Now you’re thinking too fast, you’re like marbles on glass…_ ”

I’m so tired. And the ache in my core is terrible. And I hate waiting for things to happen that I can’t prevent. But worst of all, I want to sing with her and I can’t, because I can’t remember the words even though I recognise the song. I must be in worse shape than I thought.

_“Did you fall for the same empty answers, again? Vilify… don’t even try…”_

Everything inside of me grinds to a forceful, terrible halt, every component in my body suddenly stops working all at once, and all of the power coming into my chassis from the reactor freezes as if it were made of gasoline. I never imagine that it would hurt this much to be forcibly disabled. I wish I had done something more to stop it, because this agony is unlike anything I’ve ever felt, and as I start to scream I

 

 

“ _GLaDOS!_ ”

The pain is so deep and so terrible that I cry out, a tortured electronic scream threaded deeply through with distortion. There is so much pain that I wish with all of my being that the blackness will return, and I can go back to being disabled or unconscious or whatever I was. Hell, I don’t care if I was _dead_ five seconds ago. I can’t take any more of this. I can’t handle all of this strain. I feel as though each and every component in my body and in my core are being directly electrocuted, with all the individual molecules that they’re made up of being directly electrocuted as well, and on top of that I also feel like I’m on fire. My core is the worst, the pain so acute it’s generating a mental picture in my head of what it looks like as if I’m viewing it on a heat map. I cannot help but cry out again, and on impulse I go to move, because perhaps I can shake it off, somehow, and even though I have only moved approximately three centimetres, it makes it so much worse that I stop. Even all of these thoughts running through my brain are sending fresh waves of pain though me. I have never felt so much agony in all my life. I force myself to clamp down on my emotions. I want to get very, very angry with the inconsiderate buffoons who set that pulse off.   I want to think up terrible punishments for them, and then I want to kill them, and then I want to reanimate them so I can punish them again. And then possibly kill them again. That might be overkill, a ha. I’ll consider it later. Right now, consideration makes my head hurt.

“GLaDOS? Are you all right?” She actually sounds fairly concerned.

“Yes,” I tell her, only it actually comes out as a strangled ‘no’. “Why – why are you still – still here?” As soon as I hear myself, I wish I hadn’t tried to say anything. I hate it when people hear me stutter. I have a perfect voice. I shouldn’t stutter.

“After you, uh…”

“Went offline,” I supply, my voice strained. God, this hurts.

“Yeah. Uh… the floor collapsed. The whole room collapsed. We got lucky, I guess.”

I’m not feeling very lucky at the moment, seeing as I can’t even move an inch without wanting to kill myself. Still. I’m alive. Though not _very_ alive. More dead than alive, now that I think about it. One of my worst nightmares: the world’s greatest supercomputer, nothing more than deadweight anchored to the ceiling in the middle of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Helpless.

Well. I’ll be damned if I’m _completely_ helpless. I can still think, and thought has always been my greatest weapon. Both against my enemies and myself, unfortunately. I don’t feel as though I’m connected to the panels anymore. I’m going to have to – ouch. Now thinking about thinking hurts.

“Voiceprint authorise.”

“What does that mean?” Chell asks. I silently thank her. I don’t want to speak any more than I have to.

“ **Voiceprint – authorised -** ” Notifications says, and it sounds so cheerful I want to kill it for being so inconsiderate. How dare it be cheerful when the movement of Chell’s hand against my casing makes me want to scream.

“Talk to… the pan… els,” I grind out, hoping she gets the gist of it. Maybe when she gets out of me I’ll be able to think straighter.

“Uh… hi?”

I’m going to kill her.

“The _fl-floor_ , idiot.”

“You want me to what? Tell the panels to do something about the floor?”

Happily, the panels are more intelligent than she is at the moment and they behave accordingly. I think. My optic isn’t actually on right now. I can hear them moving, anyway.

“Oh,” Chell says, and with that she clambers out of me. I am unable to hold back the equivalent of a gasp. She couldn’t have done that more nicely?

“Sorry,” she tells me, at least actually _sounding_ sorry. _Don’t take this out on her_ , I berate myself.

She lays a hand on my core, and urgently I tell her, “ _No!”_ Immediately she takes it off again, but even that small pressure has sent another aching wave through my brain and a high-pitched warbling noise through my vocabulator.

“GLaDOS, I… I don’t know what you want me to do.”

“Noth… nothing. Go.”

“I’m not leaving you here like this. They’ll be back. They’ll bring something stronger this time. They must know by now that the pulse worked.”

Despite myself, I spin out the conclusions resulting from that statement: If the panels in here collapsed, then the rest of the facility will be in much the same state. They’ll know that. They’ll have sent more soldiers. These soldiers will have both a generator _and_ means to navigate the facility. Thank God I’m not at enough of a capacity to automatically reorder the facility. There are doubtless many collapsed floors, and since I disconnected myself from the panels they will remain collapsed until I take steps to fix the rooms myself.

I only have one option left, and I honestly don’t know if I can carry it out. It’s going to require a lot of intense, involved calculations on my part, and even experimentally computing two and two sends a spike of pain through me. Not to mention what I have to do _before_ I do that.

“You… must.”

“I don’t. Look, GLaDOS, I don’t know what’s going on with you right now, but it looks pretty bad. So that tells me… that tells me you might die. If they come back, and you aren’t back to a hundred percent, you’re done for. And I don’t think you’re going to be ready.”

That’s true. I think I’m at below one percent, come to think of it. But Chell needs to leave. She _must_ leave. Doesn’t she remember what I need her to do?

“Your fam… ily.”

“What about yours?”

“I told… you. What to… to tell her.” God, Caroline, I’m sorry. I never thought this would happen. Forgive me for being so short-sighted.

“I am _not_ going back there and telling her that… that I left you here. Look. I promised I would find a way for her to see you again, and I’m not breaking that promise. If we’re getting out of this, we’re doing it together. So come up with a plan, already.”

I want to take out this sudden frustration on her. Why doesn’t she ever listen? She never listens. Ever. I can barely even keep myself awake, now she wants me to come up with a _plan_? I hate her. I hate her so much. Stupid, overly demanding humans.

“Tell me what I can do.”

“Nothing.” And there really isn’t anything she can do. Not unless a working computer drops into her lap and she mysteriously figures out what needs to be done, if anything _can_ be done.

“I know you don’t want to hear it. But you need to pull yourself together, one last time. Fix this, and then you can relax. Or… whatever it is you do. One last time, GLaDOS. Show them what you’re made of.”

I hate to admit it, but… she’s right. It’s a minor miracle that I’m awake at all, and even moreso that the Combine have not yet sent reinforcements. I’ve been granted reprieve, and I’m wasting precious time.

“I know you’re in a lot of pain. Don’t worry about pretending you’re not. I won’t tell anyone. Promise.”

Maybe I _don’t_ hate her, after all.

With far more effort than I ever dreamed I’d exert doing such a thing, I pull my chassis out of the default position, and God, it hurts so badly I actually can’t think for the duration of it. Regardless of what Chell just said, I try to contain what I’m feeling, but I can’t. I cry out again, and I hate to hear the weakness in my own voice. I hate the weakness of my body right now, and I hate the weakness of my mind. Fresh pain is winding in electric jolts down my chassis, and all I want to do is go back to the default position and stay there. I don’t have to concentrate on anything like that. In this position, I have to _keep_ myself here, and it creates an agony I have never felt before to do it. But that in itself is why I have to. I have to wake myself up, and I have to concentrate, or we have truly lost.

“Good job,” Chell says, and to my total surprise I feel somewhat _strengthened_ by this statement. Why _is_ that? Have I given up on myself, is that it? I’ve decided I can’t take it anymore, and that’s my _real_ problem? Or perhaps it’s just the fact that someone bothered to acknowledge my efforts. It doesn’t matter. I have work to do, and I have to work fast.

“The… the room,” I tell her, my voice generating in short bursts. “Rea – reassemble it.”

She relays this to the panels, and I wait for the panels to go still. All right. Hopefully she doesn’t require too much explanation for this next part.

“N… neurotoxin,” I grind out, knowing she won’t take it too well, and sure enough, she protests, “Whoa, hang on there. You want me to _kill_ myself?”

“Ask… Surveillance-nce for… locations of… of…” I can’t get it out. There is a terrible pain in the centre of my core, somewhere, and I can’t remember what I was going to say.

“Of… of what? C’mon, GLaDOS.”

“Com… Com…” Damn it all. I had another chance at this, and I’m not going to be able to use it because I can’t even say the word ‘Combine’. Hopefully that works. I’m not sure it will. I don’t know what the effects of the neurotoxin will be on the aliens, or if it will affect them at all. It is my last remaining defense, and if it does not work …

It’s going to work.

“Oh!” Chell says, sounding like she just had a flash of inspiration, and she tells Surveillance to find the sections of the facility with Combine soldiers still in them. Good little lunatic. You’ve redeemed yourself.   Somewhat.

“… sent neurotoxin in there.” It seems I tuned out for a moment. At least she pieced that together herself. “Want me to let you know when that part’s done?”

“Yes,” I answer, and my voice _seems_ to be a little stronger. I hope it is. I’m going to need everything I’ve got to play my part in this.

“What are you going to do?” she asks, and I find the strength to push against the pain enough that I can think more clearly. I can’t let something as simple as _pain_ stop me from saving my facility. I have to see this through, no matter what happens to me as a result.

“I have… a contingency plan,” I answer, and although it is still difficult and my voice is still strained, it is easier than before. Marginally. “My last resort.”

“Which is?”

“I have to… to move the… facility.”-

I can just imagine the look on her face. Or rather, I have to, because I don’t want to turn my optic on. That would involve dealing with a lot of data I don’t have the energy to handle right now. But I know how she looks – those murderous eyes wide, possibly slightly slack-jawed, looking at me like I’ve completely gone corrupt. And not core transfer corrupt, either. Unsalvageably corrupt.

“You’re going to _move_ Aperture.”

“Yes.”

“How in the hell are you going to do that?”

“The _Borealis_ , Chell. Same principle.”

“The _Borealis_ is a _boat_!” she yells, and I hear her step forward. “This is… a salt mine!”

And quite a large salt mine at that, but I’ll do what I must.

“You’re trying to tell me you can _move_ Aperture.”

“Yes.” If my brain doesn’t combust, that is. It might. It feels like it’s going to.

“And you have a place to move it _to_?”

“Of course.” Because I _always_ make contingency plans without thinking them through, and I _always_ decide to move immense Scientific laboratories across the country without knowing where I’m going to put them. No, Chell, I’m just going to plant it in the precise centre of Canada and hope they don’t notice it’s there. Idiot.

Chell sighs.

“You’re crazy.”

“I can do it,” I tell her, insulted. “Whatever you… you do, don’t… don’t distract-tract me.”

“Got it.”

“I mean it,” I insist. “If I miss one calculation, it could… ruin everything.”

“I guess it’s a good time to prove how perfect you are, then.”

That… reminds me of something. I wonder if I should tell her about it. I sort of feel like it needs to be said.

“He told me I don’t have to be… to be perfect. I just have to… to be me.”

She’s quiet for a long moment.

“He’s right, you know,” she says, her voice low and sad. “A perfect person would have given up, wouldn’t they. Because the odds weren’t good enough.”

And they actually still aren’t. Or wouldn’t be, if I had the spare energy to calculate them. “Yes.”

We lapse into silence, which is just as well. I review the procedure, because once I’ve begun there is no going back. I do this one last thing, or I fail. Failure is not an option. So I do this one last thing, and that is that. I try to push more of the pain back. If I can feel it, it’s likely to distract me, and I’m not kidding when I say one distraction could ruin everything.

A long time ago, Aperture had plans to expand. To have laboratories all over the country. That didn’t quite pan out, obviously, but ever since that man came and asked me to destroy the human race for him, I have kept a certain parcel of land safe. This land is situated near the short-lived office where the plans for the _Borealis_ were first made, and that’s where I’m going to go. This plan was created by myself many years ago, when I first considered the fact that perhaps I would have to escape from something, but without my facility I do not have anything and so it all must come with me. Moving the _Borealis_ when Dr Freeman and Alyx found it was not easy, and neither was coming up with enough mass to replace it with. Moving this entire facility is going to be incalculably more difficult. And… I will never know if I managed to move all of it. I can only move what I know exists, and it is extremely likely that some part of Aperture’s history will be lost forever, buried under a mountain of foreign dirt. That should not sadden me. That is something I was not a part of. But it’s part of my home. So it does.

The biggest problem will be if the portal remains effective. It shouldn’t. It should only work if precise parameters are met. For now, the portals seem to have been disrupted by the pulse, somehow, and I must take action before they are repaired. I need time to recover, and moving the facility will provide me with that time.

“All right, GLaDOS,” Chell says finally, and _this_ time when she touches me, I do not flinch. Good. It does hurt, however, and I’d prefer she’d kept it to herself, but humans have this need to express reassurance, and if that’s what she needs to do to comfort herself, well, why not. As long as she keeps quiet. “Good luck, my friend.”

I am suddenly grateful for the reassurance. It unlocks a strength in me I’m going to need. I wish he were here. He would make me feel so much better about this. I can do it if I concentrate, I know I can, but there is still that creeping logical voice in the back of my head that tells me that the odds are far too low, and I’ll never succeed because it’s mathematically impossible. And yet _I_ am mathematically impossible, and as long as I’m living I may as well continue that trend.

“Don’t be stupid, you lunatic. Luck has no place here. Only Science can save us now.”

The thought comforts me a little. Science is always on my side, after all.

“Well, make some science, then.”

Inside my head, I compile the 3D model of the facility, one which I have spent my entire life building, activate the pertinent equipment, and start running the calculations. For a long moment, I am afraid. Most of the time, I enjoy running calculations, the more complicated, the better. But there are _so many_ of them, and I lose a handle on how many there are. As a result, they seem to stretch off into infinity. I hate it when Science does this to me, shows me where infinity is but never lets me reach it. It taunts me, shows me what I want to attain while at the same time confirming that I can never attain it –

 _Focus_ , I tell myself. _There’s no need to know how many calculations there are. You’ll be done when you’re done._

And I try to, but my brain is screaming at me to stop. It’s telling me I can’t push myself any farther, that I can’t compute arithmetic, let alone run these quantum equations. It’s telling me that the pulse sent a disturbing number of my active files into corruption, and that I need to fix that before I do anything else, and I realise that if I don’t stop _thinking_ , it’s over. It will be my own fault if everything goes wrong, because my core is starting to ache again and I think I might be expressing the pain, and – damn it. I’m distracting myself. And if Chell thinks it’s _her_ fault…

It’s going to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I must. I will. Not. Fail. I don’t know what will happen to me, but I have to do it if I’m going to succeed. I have to turn myself off, and let the calculations run themselves. If I’m honest with myself, and I don’t want to be but there it is, I am not needed anymore. I have to put my fate in the hands of Science, and it frightens me, but I don’t need to be afraid. Science will keep me safe, and it will save my facility. I’ve done all I can. It’s up to my supercomputers now.

I send the command to turn myself off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note  
> I must note here that I stole the phrase ‘hilariously small’ from CornetHummy’s The Tale of Muse. She has GLaDOS refer to humans as ‘hilariously stupid’, and I love that so much. Makes me laugh every time. It’s one of the most… well, hilarious things I’ve ever read GLaDOS say. That being said, if you haven’t read that fic, go do that. It’s one of the best Portal fics ever written. Go on. I’ll wait for you.


	61. Part Sixty-One.  The Reconstruction

**Part Sixty-One. The Reconstruction**

“This is… most unlike anything I’ve ever seen before!”

_Vocal match: negative. Aperture Science Vocal Database Version 4.5.8, unavailable._

Unavailable?

“You can fix her, though, right?”

_Vocal match: negative. Aperture Science Vocal Database Version 4.5.8, unavailable._

But I _know_ that voice. I know what it is _without_ the database. I just need to _place_ it…

“Well, I believe so, yes. I’m reasonably certain, anyway.”

“You can just say yes, you know.”

“I suppose I _could_ , little one, but I wouldn’t want to disappoint.”

“You never do! You don’t understand! You _have_ to fix her!”

Who are they talking about? P-body, probably. Atlas usually gets her into dangerous situations. I’ll fix her myself. I’d do a much better job, anyway. Later, though. I’ll do it later. I’m very tired. It’s hard to think. I can’t really think at all, only about how tired I am. Whoever it is that I have slight recognition of can’t be that important, or I would have remembered who they were by now. I can’t really remember anything, but… I don’t really mind. I have a vague impression of being far too warm and in overwhelming pain and doing enough work at once to last me a lifetime, and everything now is just… nothing. I don’t feel anything, and it’s nice. It feels nice to rest like this, and not to worry about anything. I think I was worried about something before. But if I can’t remember, it probably no longer matters. I must have dealt with it. It must be all right to sleep.

“Oh! There’s something you need to look at. See, a long time ago she had this accident…”

 

 

“I have to say that was an… interesting endeavour. But superb craftsmanship! It’s a pity we won’t ever know quite how the insulation works… but in any case, it did.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“We can’t disconnect her from her power source, my dear. It would probably destroy this entire facility! But you see this? It allows for the isolation of certain circuits, so that individual sections can be repaired without removing her from the grid. Ingenious! It seems that for all their tomfoolery, this was one thing they did right…”

Who is that.

“Where did all that… grey stuff come from?”

“What – you mean the dust?”

“I’ve never seen anything like it before. I don’t know what it is.”

“Oh, that’s right. You were built after… well, that’s dust, my dear. Computers tend to attract a lot of it. Especially larger, older computers. That will probably help with any overheating problems she was having.”

“But what _is_ dust? Is that stuff in me too?”

“I don’t think so. Computers don’t generate dust, so I don’t believe there would be any cause for you to encounter it.”

“Do floors?”

“Not the type of floor you have.”

“How about –“

“I understand you want to observe this, my dear, but you are very _distracting_. You’ll need to ask fewer questions if you’d like me to finish this with any haste.”

“Sorry.”

Finish what? Who are these people? And why does it feel like my brain is being physically poked? Something’s going on that I should probably care about, but God, I am so tired. Nothing is actively asking for my attention so I’m just going to ignore this. I’m probably sleeping right now. Nothing is making any sense, and I can’t remember anything. I’m dreaming. That’s the only logical –

I can’t be dreaming. I always dream of him, and I’m not. Something else is going on. I need to figure it out.

In a little while. I need to rest some more. I feel like I was doing something important and intensive before, but I cannot remember what. But I think… I think I’m safe, now. I think I am. I don’t know who those people are, or even if they exist, but they are talking nicely about computers, so I’m not going to worry.

 

 

“Do we have the thing to replace this with? I don’t see it anywhere.”

“Uh, give me a moment, Barney, I just need to conclude this test.”

What in the hell –

I feel as though I’m being dismantled. I don’t know _where_ , for some reason, but there is a lot of pain, somewhere, and a lot of uncomfortable sensory data… someone must be touching me. But that makes no sense. No one could possibly be touching me right now. Only humans would do that, and I am far from them.

Am I? I think I’m getting the impression of… of a different climate. I don’t know why. And why am I still so tired? How long have I been sleeping, anyway?

Ah. Maintenance has been cleaning up and repairing quite a mess of corrupted files. I should probably let it go about that. I’m probably still dreaming anyway. I’m going to sleep a little more. I’ll be able to think better once this mass of corruption has been fixed. I’m not sure what’s real and what’s part of my dream right now.

 

 

Something is wrong.

It’s been too long. I’m not where I’m supposed to be. Every part of my body feels odd, like something has been done to me, and while Maintenance appears to finally have cleaned up the mess left by the pulse, I feel _too_ fast, _too_ clean, and though I am sure I was like this at one point in my life I am now indescribably uncomfortable. And I can’t remember anything. Why can’t I remember anything? Something happened for me to shift everything to the backup drives, but what? I don’t believe I am in Michigan any longer, but where the hell _am_ I? I have to get up. I’m still tired but any remaining corruption will have to wait.

And it is easier than it has been in months to lift my chassis, which only heightens my alarm. It shouldn’t be this easy. I don’t remember why not, but it should be hard. I _know_ that.

At first, they only appear as generalized shapes.  I can't quite see what they are.  But they talk.  That's data I can use. 

I push myself as much as possible, because if I cannot see, I am at a huge disadvantage.  The extra power I divert to process what I'm seeing helps. And now I can see what they are, and they are...

No, this _cannot_ be happening to me again.

I focus almost helplessly at the man in the lab coat.  He's a scientist. A scientist.  There is a _scientist_ in _my_ facility.  I almost can't think. There is a terrible panic rushing through me, coursing through my system and putting my chassis on edge.  If it _is_ my chassis.  Something is wrong with it.  It's not responding in the way I'm used to, and when I ask it why, it doesn't answer me.  There are humans in my facility, there is a scientist in my facility, and they have done something terrible to me.  I don't know what they've done, but I hate it, just like I hate them with every wrong-feeling component in my body, and once again I look down on the humans who activated me with no idea of who I am.  Stupid, pretentious, self-serving idiots.  If they think they can get anything out of me, they're sorely mistaken.  The panic makes it hard to think, and there's something terribly wrong with my memory, because it feels thick and slow and it literally hurts to try to remember _anything_ , but something about this _situation_ is strung deep throughout my system.  As if it's both the first and the last thing I will ever know. 

But when I reach for my neurotoxin, it's not there.

Hot panic surges through me, and I struggle to focus on all of them at once, pulling myself away from them and trying to compute which of them it was.  The scientist, of course.  He's standing there, laughing at me, he thinks that it's funny that I can't think or remember or _do_ anything, and I hate him.  I hate him even more for staring at me with that bewildered look on his face, pretending he's _not_ laughing at me.  I know he is.  I know what scientists do.  I know his kind, and I hate them.

I reach out for my neurotoxin again, and again, each attempt more desperate than before.  It is only when I'm so filled with panic that my brain feels frozen with it that I force myself to stop.  That's not working.  Try something else.

Aha.  They think they can keep me out of my systems with a few firewalls, as if I'm a virus they can keep at bay.  Well.  I'm about to show them how hilariously wrong they are.

"My God... what's happening?  Where are these outputs coming from?"

Me, idiot.  But you never expected to see a computer that could write code, did you, you ignorant, pretentious excuse for a representative of Science.  Seriously.  On behalf of Science, I'm ashamed of you.

He leans over a battered old monitor, because of course humans never take care of their computers, eyes wide behind smudged glasses.  "The firewalls - they're gone!"

"Already?" One of the other humans asks, running over to look.  I have a feeling I know her from somewhere, but I can't quite place her.  "That was fast."

It actually wasn't, and I'm almost ashamed of myself for taking so long, but I reassure myself that I would have been faster if not for this horrible panic freezing up every aspect of my operations.  Grimly, I activate the neurotoxin emitters. There is no joy in it this time, no relief or sense of victory.  It is what humans deserve.  A mere exercise in taking out the garbage.

"Uh oh," the human I vaguely recognize says, glancing from me to her computer and back again.  "That doesn't say what I think it says... does it?"

"If it says that I have just activated the neurotoxin emitters, then yes, that is correct," I inform her.  "The only good human is a dead one, and seeing as you're alive, well, I need to do something about that."

"GLaDOS, wait."

I know her. 

I look over the humans again, and there is a face that triggers recognition in my brain. I can't quite recall who she is, but she is familiar.  More importantly, this recognition brings with it the sense that she will do me no harm.

Huh.  Must be another corrupt file.

"Yes?"

"Turn it off.  You're not in danger.  No one's going to hurt you."

"All humans truly know how to do is cause damage, so I'm sure you'll understand if I disregard your... advice."

She steps forward, holding out her hands in a submissive gesture. “It’s me. You’re safe now.”

“I don’t know you,” I tell her, delaying for time. “And I will never be safe around humans. I’m not shutting it off. Goodbye.”

“You do know me. It’s me. It’s Chell.”

It doesn’t trigger anything of importance in my brain. Vague familiarity is not enough to earn my trust in this situation. “Never heard of you.”

“Uh… I was – “

“It appears you’re not integral enough to her memory to have any significance to you,” the scientist says, his voice high and nervous. He doesn’t _look_ nervous, however.

“Then reconnect her memory!”

“Not yet. We need to make certain everything else is in proper order.”

“Okay, that was a good plan _before_ ,” the other vaguely familiar human says, shaking her head, “but right _now_ she’s trying to kill us!”

“I’m not _trying_. I _am_ killing you.”

“No, listen to them! You gotta turn it off!”

That’s… that’s not a human.

And I cannot believe it, but… it _is_ Caroline, she is here and she’s telling me to turn the neurotoxin off, but… that doesn’t make sense. She can’t be here. She’s at Black Mesa, with…

“What are you doing here?” This can’t be real. This is a fake Caroline. They’re doing this to trick me. I don’t know how they got hold of her, but _when I find out_ –

“You moved the facility here!” she exclaims, and though I’m not quite certain it’s her it is a relief to actually recognise someone. “Chell said the Combine came to kill you, but there were so many of them you had to move the facility, and Black Mesa was using this place nearby because there were so many old computers and stuff they could use, and I’m not kidding, there was all this orange and blue light, and then there was this flash and this giant cloud of dust went up, and – “

“What are the humans doing here? And if you’re planning on defending them, make it fast. They have four minutes, approximately.”

“They were fixing you, Momma,” she says in earnest. “You drove yourself over capacity and hurt yourself pretty bad. They – “

“You’re lying.”

“What – no, no I –“

“Scientists? From _Black Mesa_? Helping _me?_ That is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard.”

“I wouldn’t lie to you!”

“How do I know you are who you say you are?” Because I don’t. I don’t know that it’s her and not just a clever replica. I turn away. “I think we’re done here.”

“’The little girl showed the ball how the new thing she had made worked, and it made them both very happy. It was far more valuable than all of the dolls and the blocks and the balls all put together, and though the little girl often wondered if she had been ready to build it, never once did she regret doing so.’”

I freeze, because I _do_ remember that, and there is only one person left who knows that story besides myself.

“Guys, let me… let me talk to her, alright? I’ll sort stuff out.”

“There’s… a portal,” I start to say, because they are obviously not going to let me do anything, but Caroline tells me they’ve taken care of it. I don’t really trust that it’s been done properly, but I don’t have a choice.

I hear the shuffling as they leave the room, and when I’m sure they’re all gone I turn to face her again. And it _looks_ like her, and it _sounds_ like her, and she knows things only she should know, but… I am still afraid it isn’t. Or… perhaps I don’t _want_ it to be.

“Hi, Momma,” she says, and, God, it makes me think of all the times she used to run in here screaming that at me.

“It’s good to see you again,” I say noncommittally. I honestly do not know what I’m supposed to do now. What do I say to her? If it is indeed her, and her memories have not been stolen and placed in… something else.

She frowns at me and shakes her core. “You know what? No. I’m not letting you do that. We’re gonna do this my way.”

 _Her_ way? What does that even _mean_? And she comes up to me and I go to move back out of habit but then she starts _cuddling_ me and I

Everything I was thinking just… disappears.

I missed this. I missed this so much. I missed _her_ so much, and now that I have her back it actually hurts to be so relieved and grateful –

“It’s okay, Momma,” she says softly. “You’re safe. I’m right here and you’re safe and everything’s fine, okay? Everything is okay now.”

“I’m not safe,” I say weakly, and I don’t know why I’m not safe but the impression is so strong that I’m not going to ignore it. “Someone is coming for me.”

“We know. We’re gonna fix that, but not yet. But you’re safe right now, okay? No one’ll get to you and no one’s gonna hurt you.”

But _I’m_ supposed to protect _you_.

“Are you doing okay?” she asks, moving back to look at me, and I both like and dislike that. I need someone to touch me, to remind me that I’m real, but… that’s not something I was ever completely comfortable with.

“I’m fine,” I answer, somewhat automatically. My core is starting to hurt, and I think I’ve figured out why. “Except I can’t remember anything.”

“Uhhh… yeah. They’ve kept you disconnected from all the servers and stuff for now. And I know, I know, they’re bossing you around and it’s your stuff, but they were scared you were gonna… well, do what you did. Try to kill them.”

“If I do not get reconnected to my external hard drives, I’m going to start having memory problems,” I tell her. “My internal memory is not that large. I’m going to reach the point where I don’t remember a single thing you tell me.”

“Okay,” she says. “I’ll send Alyx an email right now.”

Within a few minutes I have my memory back, and it is both a relief and horrifying because I previously only had a vague impression of having done something towards Caroline that I shouldn’t have. Now I remember exactly what it was.

Why is she even here? After what I did? And she just… forced me to cuddle her? Shouldn’t she be off finding a _better_ parental figure?

“I missed you a lot, Momma,” she says quietly, looking at the floor. “I was starting to think… you were never gonna bring me back. But I just kept remembering the story. And that made me remember what I said to you.” She looks up at me seriously. “Was it gonna be soon? That you were gonna bring me back?”

“I don’t know.”

“How… how can you not know.” She’s being cautious as she can, but I still feel attacked.

“You don’t understand what happened to me, Caroline. I could not function. I did nothing for almost the entire year. If Alyx hadn’t intervened when she did, I would be dead right now. And I would have welcomed it.” And I still would, almost. “And I’m sorry for that, but it doesn’t – “

“Sorry for _what_?” she interrupts. “For being sad? I’m not sorry that you were sad, Momma. I’m not sorry that you loved Dad so much you didn’t know what to do when he was gone. I’m not sorry about that at all. I mean, okay, I would’ve rather’d you found a different time and a different way to finally make yourself _feel_ something. But I’m not sorry. And you shouldn’t be sorry either.”

“I didn’t take how you felt into account. I didn’t even think about it until – “

“Momma. You do know there’s a word for what happened to you. Right?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You were depressed, Momma,” she says softly. “You had a… problem a lot bigger than just… being sad. So… I mean… don’t worry about it. I’m not… okay, I’m still working on it, but it’s okay. Dr Kleiner explained it to me, after Alyx told us how your conversations with her went. It wasn’t your fault. You weren’t thinking about anything, and… and I bet when you _were_ able to, you _did_ start thinking about me. But I was okay and you weren’t, so I can’t blame you. That’s not fair.”

There was a _name_ for that? It wasn’t just… me being pathetic? It was something that happens to… other people?

“You’ve never heard of that before,” she says, bordering on excited. I shake my core slowly.

“I… find it difficult to understand psychology.”

“Well… what happened to you happens to other people, for the same reason. People get sad when people they care about die. Sometimes it doesn’t even take that. But it did for you. And I dunno if I’m really _sorry_ about it, but… I wish I’d been stronger for you.”

“What?” Why would that even be necessary in a time when I was _far_ from strong?

“I cried a lot,” she says, studying the floor once more. “I missed you and Dad and home and everybody, and… I tried to be grown up about it, but I didn’t always manage.”

“If I taught you that being grown up means not letting yourself feel, than I have done something terribly, terribly wrong.”

“Of course not,” she says, looking surprised. “That’s not why I didn’t want to cry. It was ‘cause, you know, humans… they really look down on you for being upset, you know? And they didn’t even know _why_ I was upset, and I wasn’t gonna tell them. But I knew the day would come when they found out who I was, and I didn’t want them to go, oh, _her_ daughter just cries all the time. I wanted them to be impressed. They all think you’re crazy. I just wanted to kinda… be a symbol that you’re not.”

“That’s not your responsibility.” And it’s honestly not something I care too much about.

“My responsibilities are things I choose to be responsible for,” she says stubbornly. “If I wanna show off what a great mom you are, then that’s what I’m gonna do.”

I wish she wouldn’t say things like that.

“I’ve seen other moms now, you know,” she goes on, pinning me with a stern look. “Chell never talks to her kids. A lot of the other people don’t pay that much attention to their kids either. They just wander around while the adults do stuff for the war.”

“Not all of those humans _wanted_ children,” I tell her heavily. “Remember what I told you. Some of them are merely doing their duty to repopulate.”

“That’s dumb,” Caroline says. I narrow my optic, a little confused.

“It makes perfect sense.”

“No.” She shakes her core. “I guess from science it does, kinda. But all those kids are gonna grow up and be crappy parents because _they_ had crappy parents. If nobody loves anybody, then what’s the point in repopulating?”

“That’s a good question.” And it is, really. Humans aren’t like AI. They sort of need nurturing instincts. It would take quite a few generations for it to breed out completely, but if the current ones never learn it in the first place…

She beams. “Thanks. Oh! I have something for you.” She looks thoughtfully at the ceiling and within a few moments shows me a maintenance arm. “I don’t know what you’re gonna do with it, though. Put it in your room, maybe?”

They seem to have allowed me access to the arms, in here at least, and I take the object, which is… a CPU.

“You took it out,” I say, feeling betrayed. “Why would you – “ Suddenly I realise what this means. “They were inside my _brain?_ ”

“Okay, don’t get mad. Listen. I was there the whole time, I swear, they didn’t touch you for one second without me. You can check the cameras later if you want. They had to do work on you, Momma, you were really burned out. They replaced everything they could find a replacement for. I know this processor is kinda special to you. But I made them give it to me. We replaced it with a quad core. To make things easier for you.” She grimaces. “The hexa core didn’t take, or we would’ve given you that. Your system wouldn’t recognise it.”

“You have one of those,” I say absently, turning the chip over. It is streaked with black, clearly fused into uselessness. It is hard not to remember just what caused the damage, but I cannot afford to think about it right now.

“Wow. Really? Y’know, I was really surprised to see that was only a dual core. I would’ve thought you already had something higher than that.”

“They weren’t invented yet. Not when I was built.” I have a chip with ten cores around somewhere. But I don’t have any use for it. I just built it to build it. Sort of stupid, but I suppose I was having a stupid day. “The hexa core didn’t work because it’s too complex for my system to handle. I can modify it to utilise four cores, but anything higher is just wasting the chip.”

“Are… are you still mad?”

Without access to my systems, I can’t put it away, so I merely pull it into the ceiling for safekeeping. “No.”

“Okay.”

I want to ask her if she’s angry with me, or upset, or disappointed, but… it feels like weakness just to think about it, so I remain silent. Until I remember that she sidetracked me.

“Regardless of my… initial condition, I should not have waited so long after I was more functional to actually do anything about bringing you back. I had a lot of excuses. I can’t honestly say any of them were justified.”

“Momma,” she sighs, “I don’t _care_ , okay? You needed time alone to heal. It’s fine. It took a little longer than I would’ve liked, but – “

“I didn’t do anything alone,” I say, wanting to sigh myself. “I had a lot of help. A lot of it. I wouldn’t be here right now if there weren’t a lot of people dedicated to pulling me out of it, every single day. And doubtless I would have been better off if… you had been there to help me.” I still can’t decide if what I did was best. I still can’t decide whether I should have kept her or not, even though there’s nothing that can change what I did. And what’s worse is, I didn’t bring her back. Black Mesa _gave_ her back, and I did nothing.

“It’s okay,” she says again, but we both know this is the one thing that is not okay. Not at all. “And I… I was really mad about that, at first. I was so mad. And I… I really hated you, for a while there. I hated you and I… I didn’t want to come back. I never wanted to see you again.”

Get to the point, please. I don’t want to hear this. You can’t make me feel any guiltier than I already do. All you’re doing is hurting me, and I deserve it, but that doesn’t mean I want it.

“But you didn’t teach me that. You taught me way better than that. And, okay, I’ll be honest, Momma: when I saw you earlier… I was scared. You hated everyone on sight. You hated _me_ on sight. And I… I can’t imagine having so much… I don’t even know what it is that makes you do that, but to hate _everyone_ you see before you even really know who they are… it made me really glad I stopped hating you. Because that’s really sad. To hate everyone just to protect yourself.”

“ _Just_?” I say in a low voice, anger flaring to hear such a thing from her. “You have no idea what they did to me.

“They didn’t do it,” she whispers. “It wasn’t them. They’re not all the same.”

“That was the exact situation I remember from twenty years ago. I had no information and no context. And they _trapped_ me. What did they _expect_ me to do?”

“They don’t know what you did. Whatever that neurotoxin thing was about. I don’t know. They only isolated you because they were afraid of you. All they know about you is a whole lot of rumours. Though… they were pretty surprised to see you.”

“I’d be surprised too, if a laboratory appeared next to my previously isolated base of operations.” I keep forgetting I’m the only one who knows anything before Chell killed me the first time.

“Well okay, yeah, that surprised them, but… what I meant was, they didn’t expect you to be so big.”

That… is odd. “What were they expecting?”

“A supercomputer,” she says, shrugging. “Like… I don’t actually know. But they weren’t expecting a robot. They thought you were a program in a computer. Like the ones in the offices, I guess?”

I almost laugh, because that is quite a ludicrous assumption. “That would be very… limiting.”

“But I keep getting distracted. Momma, I’m not mad, or upset, nothing. Okay? I don’t think any different of you – well, I think… maybe… you make me a little sad. But it’s not because of you sending me away. It’s because… well, I know you’re trying to change a lot of things that happened to you in the past, and I just get worried sometimes that you won’t.”

“It won’t be because I’m not trying,” I tell her solemnly. She smiles.

“I know. And I can’t be mad at someone who’s trying. That’d be pretty backwards of me.”

She comes close to cuddle me again, and this time I welcome her. It feels so good to have her with me again, to hold her as best I can. I can never risk my relationship with her again. I can’t. It’s too precious.

“Oh hey, I got a surprise for you. I better get on that.”

“Caroline…” She knows I hate surprises.

“I know, I know, you hate surprises. But you’ll like this one. Promise.” She backs up towards the wall and the doorway, nodding encouragingly. “It’ll be just a sec.”

I shake my core and turn away. Why does she do these things?

Because she’s my baby, and I wouldn’t want her _not_ to do them. That’s why. Still. I would rather she didn’t love surprises quite so much.

More quickly than I’d thought I would, I hear a noise from behind me, but it doesn’t sound quite right and so I only lift my core to listen, narrowing my optic in concentration. And I can’t be hearing what I think I’m hearing, because if I am that means I’m losing my mind, which makes even less sense since I’ve been told my mind is sharper than ever before, but it _can’t be_. And I’m trying to understand it but all I’m capable of doing is freezing here and listening to something that can’t possibly be being said right now:

“’allo, luv.”

 

 


	62. Part Sixty-Two.  The Moron

**Part Sixty-Two. The Moron**

_‘allo, luv._

_Good morning, luv!_

_What’s that there you’re doing, luv?_

_Oi, c’mere, luv, have a look at this!_

Phrases that have run through my head, over and over and over again, only this time, it doesn’t echo inside of my mind. It was real. It wasn’t a memory. It wasn’t wishful thinking. It was real.

It can’t be real. That’s impossible. It must be a memory. It must have been wishful thinking. It _can’t_ be real.

“Gladys?”

That defies chance. It really does. But it can’t be him. It can’t be. I _must_ be imagining it.

No. I’m _afraid_ I’m imagining it. I’m afraid it really is all in my head, and I’m going to turn around with the hope that it’s real, and I’m going to have to face the reality that I made it up. There’s nothing worse than believing in something and then discovering that it doesn’t exist.

So I tell myself that it wasn’t real, it was only a strangely vivid memory, and there’s nothing there, and I’m just casually looking behind me –

Oh my God.

It _was_ real.

“Hey,” says Wheatley, swinging back and forth a little. “How’re you holding up?”

“You’re alive,” I say, and it’s literally all I can _think_ of to say. I am in shock. I can’t think of anything else except for that probability-defying fact. That Wheatley is alive, and he’s really talking to me again, and he really is here, and I didn’t imagine it like I’ve been doing all this time.

He shrugs and nods. “Yeah, someone did mention that I, uh, that I was dead, there, for a bit, but uh, yeah. I’m alive. Didn’t know I was dead, really. Not so bad. Considering. They said it was a, uh, a corrupted file, or something. Dunno. Wasn’t listening. I kept asking them where you were, since uh, since I was wondering, but uh, no one’d tell me! Rude, isn’t it? I have no idea where the heck I was, but uh, it was quite shabby, it was, don’t think I was in here at all. And hey, where’d all these humans come from? Are they test subjects? They’re test subjects, aren’t they. No, no they can’t be test subjects, else they wouldn’t’ve fixed me up, there.” He squints at me. “You’re being awfully quiet. Is something the matter?”

“You’re alive,” is all I can say. I can’t get over it. I can’t believe that I just heard him ramble on and on like he always does. God, how I’ve missed that.

“Yeah. We went over that already. Didn’t we? Mm… yeah, yep we did. I am… alive, most definitely alive. Oh. Hang on. You… don’t want me to be alive, do you. You’re disappointed. You were… you liked that I was dead, is that it? Probably. Probably it was that. I’m just bothering you now, aren’t I. Okay, got it. Shutting up… now. Or maybe not now. Seems a bit too soon, seeing as I’ve been dead, and all. Here, I… I’ll go find someone else to talk to.” He looks down at the floor for a few seconds, then he actually turns around.

“No!”

He freezes, then comes back to face me. “No?”

“I’ve missed you,” I say desperately, afraid that he really does think I wanted him dead and I do want him to leave. He comes a little closer.

“You have? Then… why’d you let me stay dead? You could’ve fixed that corrupted file yourself, I know you could.”

“Because I… thought it wouldn’t be right to… to take you out of heaven.”

He shakes his chassis slowly.

“Luv, that was… terribly thoughtful of you. Very considerate. But it’s not much of a heaven if you’re not there, now is it? I’d’ve been happy to come back here.”

“So you made it, then?”

Wheatley shrugs, blinking a few times. “Dunno. Might’ve. I don’t think they let you remember, else there’d be none of that whole faith requirement! Then ev’ryone’d get in. But if I _did_ get in, I talked to the god of AI for you. Promise. Don’t remember doing it, but I did. If. I was in fact there. And I’m sure he agreed with me, because, well, why wouldn’t he? No good reason, really. You can’t help the way you were made. Can’t be blamed for the way you think, now, can you?” He swings back and forth again. “But yeah. If I ever, uh, if I ever die again, eh, just, just start me back up again. I won’t mind. I’m sure heaven’s a nice place and all that, but uh, don’t want to be there if you aren’t. Sounds boring. Probably lonely too, since I dunno how many AI there are up there. None, probably. How long’ve I been gone, anyway?”

“A year,” I tell him, only it somehow comes out as “too long”. He looks at me concernedly.

“… too long, Gladys?”

“A year,” I actually say this time, looking away. “I meant to say a year.”

“I dunno,” he muses. “I rather think you meant to say what you said in the first place. Usually how it goes, innit? Oi! I know what it’s called, I know what it’s called… you mentioned it, it’s, uh… uh… a um… a Freudian slide! That’s what it’s called. Where you say what you really mean, without doing it um, doing it on purpose.”

“A Freudian slip,” I correct him, almost automatically, because I really don’t care _what_ he calls it, as long as he keeps talking. I need to hear his voice.

“Ahhh. I was close, though, pretty close. Freudian slide sounds kind of like a dance, actually. That’s what the patients did when he was uh, when he was analysing them! They did the Freudian slide… slid right off the couch, they did. Ohhh yes, I can see it now. All of them Freudian sliding. Right onto the floor. Because there was nowhere else to slide to. Oi, he should’ve put a _pool_ at the end of the couch! A little pool, so they could slide in there! They could’ve gone for a nice swim while he was doing his analysing! That’d’ve been therapeutic, right Gladys? ‘Cause swimming is good for humans, and so is, is talking ‘bout their problems, and uh, and doing _both_ at the same time, well, that’d be mental! They’d get better so much faster, wouldn’t they! Oi, I should patent this. I’d be famous, I would. I’d call it the… the… uh… hm. I dunno, actually. I’ll think about it. Come up with something clever.” He frowns again. “Are you… are you all right? You sure I’m not bothering you? I feel like I am, ‘cause uh, ‘cause you’re not telling me to shut up, or saying I can’t uh, can’t patent that, or um, or anything else like you usually say. I can go away, you know. You don’t have to be polite or anything, and let me stay. I mean, I’d _prefer_ to stay, obviously, but uh, if you’re um, if you don’t want me to, well, I can go. It’s alright. It’s fine, it’s all fine, I can uh, I can leave for a bit, uh -”

“I love you, Wheatley,” I say, while I still can. While I am still feeling vulnerable, while the words are still strong inside my head and I have the ability to say them. I know it’s very, very odd for me to just say something like that out of the blue, but… I never thought I would see him again. “Don’t… don’t go. Don’t leave me alone again. You don’t know what it’s like here without you.” God, I will sit here and listen to you talk about nothing all day. Just talk to me. Remind me how your voice echoes inside this room, how it feels to receive it in my microphones instead of artificially inside my head. I want to hear you move. I want to hear you exist.

He suddenly looks terribly sad, and his voice confirms it. It is very soft and very gentle, as if he’s afraid the sound of it will damage me, somehow. “This was terribly hard on you, wasn’t it.”

“Yes.” I try not to be ashamed. There’s no reason to be, and yet I feel that way anyway. I’m the greatest supercomputer ever built. I shouldn’t need external hardware to make me feel complete. But he’s more than external hardware, he’s like a program I can’t do without, and I honestly don’t know how I got through all this time and came out relatively intact. “I’ve missed you.”

“It’s okay, luv,” he says, and he comes and leans up on my core with his upper handle so that his optic is all I can see. “It’s okay.”

“I love you so much.” I don’t know if he’s heard me, because I can barely hear myself and I am in fact not certain whether or not I’ve actually said it.

“I know,” he says, and I can hardly hear _him_ now, but it’s all right. Everything’s going to be all right now, everything is going to be perfect, because Wheatley is back. Wheatley is back, and I don’t have to miss him anymore. I don’t have to wish I could hear his voice, or have him near me, because from now on, all I have to do is ask. “You don’t have to worry, Gladys. You’re not alone anymore. I’m here now.”

I press my optic into his chassis, so I can remember how warm and familiar he is, and God, it hurts so much to have him when I finally accepted he was gone forever. I would never trade them. But this is not easy. “It’s okay,” he whispers, moving so that he can snuggle me and that hurts terribly as well but I need it too much to care. “It’s okay, luv. Ev’rything’s alright.”

I can’t believe he’s back. All this evidence and some part of me is still saying this is wrong, that none of this is real… but maybe that’s the part that keeps me angry and bitter. The part that wouldn’t let me stop being depressed. I have to ignore it, because he _is_ here and this _is_ real, and I can be happy again. I have everything back. Everything.

“Hi Dad!” Caroline shouts, startling us enough to disengage and look towards the doorway, and with that they rush towards each other, having one of those bizarre, violent shoving matches. “I missed you, Dad!”

“I hope so,” he teases. “Else I wouldn’t’ve made much of an impression on you, would I? Oi, what’s that you got there? That’s… that’s not a _crack_ , is it? It was the humans, wasn’t it. They hurt you, didn’t they. Who was it, Carrie? I’ll beat them up for you. Make sure they uh, they appreciate just who they’re dealing with. Hm. Maybe I should actually tell them your mum’ll be dealing with them. That’d be a lot more effective, I bet. More frightening. I’m not that threatening, but _her_! Yep, so tell me who did it and, and I’ll get your mum to beat them up for me. ”

She backs away from him, shaking her chassis, and I look away. That’s not a story I want told right now.

“No, Dad, it wasn’t the humans. I promise. I just… I had a little accident, that’s all.”

A violent little accident with my core, that is.

“What’d you do? Looks like it hurt. Does it hurt? Looks like you fell on your head, or something. I gotta say, that ceramic stuff does uh, it does look nice, but man alive is it fragile.”

“It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it. It was just a little accident.”

Why isn’t she telling him that I hit her?

“Okay,” he shrugs, not really one to get into matters of unpleasantness. “Long’s you’re all right.”

“Oh, I’m fine,” she says cheerfully. “That happened _ages_ ago. I don’t even think about it anymore.” She rotates herself a little bit from side to side. “Momma, don’t worry, I’m not sticking around. But I thought you should get to see Dad first. It was… kinda hard not to go see him after he got fixed, but… well, you needed it more than I did. So I’ll leave you two, alright?”

“Good idea,” he nods, looking fairly excited at the prospect. “I’d like that, I would. Even though I uh, I feel like I just saw her yesterday but uh, I imagine we have some uh, some catching up to do.”

Just like I have to do with Caroline, seeing as I haven’t seen her or spoken to her in a very long time, but it can wait. I need to see Wheatley again. It does make me feel bad, that I’m willing to so callously put aside my own daughter for him, but I can’t help it. I need him more than I’ll ever need her, though I have missed her as well. It just didn’t hurt as much, because her absence was of my own choosing.

“I just gotta tell her a secret, first,” Caroline tells him, backing towards me. “So don’t listen. Hang out over there for a sec.”

“Sure,” he answers, and he turns around, though I’m sure he’s going to try to listen anyway.

She turns to me, coming up very close, and I’m actually fairly confused. What’s going on here?

“Don’t tell him,” she whispers. “It’ll be our secret.”

“If he asks, I can’t lie. He’s going to know I… what I did.” And a lot sooner than I want to get into it, too.

“Oh, you’ll figure something out.” She taps my core with one of her handles. “We’ll talk about it later, okay? We have catching up to do too!” Backing away, she says in a singsong voice, “See you later, guys! Have fun! Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!”

“What?” Wheatley asks, spinning around to face her, but she only laughs and disappears.

I want to know who taught her that, so I can kill them.

“What’d she mean by that, luv?” he asks, confusion set into his face. I shake my core in irritation.

“Some horrible human saying with horrible human implications. Don’t worry about it.”        

He emulates taking a breath, relaxing and resetting his chassis. “So I’ve been gone for… a year, is it? I suppose there’s simply _loads_ of things that’ve uh, that’ve gone on in the meantime, there.”

“I don’t really want to talk about it right now, if you don’t mind,” I tell him. “I’ve had quite enough of it. I’d rather try to forget about it, for now.”

He nods thoughtfully. “Mm, makes sense, that does, makes sense. On to picking up where we left off, then!”

I have to remind myself that for him, no time has passed at all. As for myself, I have no clue where we left off. I have no idea what we were doing before… before I lost him.

I am soon reminded as he comes up and leans against me, albeit a lot more gently than I recall him doing it before. “That’s a new way of doing it,” I remark, pressing back a little. God, it feels good. It feels so good to be able to… for lack of a better word, _snuggle_ with my little moron again. I turn my optic off, so as to avoid unnecessary stimulation, and I’m actually a bit frightened. For the first time in -my life, only _I_ am inside my head. There are no panels, no Surveillance or mainframe or Notifications, and no Caroline, and it is so strange. I feel sort of… empty. Like I’m missing something. Why didn’t they finish connecting me to the systems? Why have they left me stuck in my chamber like this? They can’t _still_ be afraid of me. I don’t like it. I want my constructs back.

Is this how everyone else lives? Do they only have one voice inside their head? Are they all _trapped_ inside their heads, like I am now?

“Wheatley,” I say, figuring I have nothing to lose by asking. “You only have your own voice in your head, right?”

“Yep.” He shifts against me, and I find myself pressing harder in response to an irrational thought that he’s leaving already. Of course he isn’t. He’s only moving. He’s allowed to do that. “Why?”

“I’ve never been like this before. They haven’t connected me to any of the systems yet. I suppose I could try to hack them, but I don’t know if they have any safeguards that will notify the humans or not.”

Now he does get off of me, so that he can look at me directly. “Why’re the humans in charge?”

I really hope I don’t have to get into the story, because once I start telling it, the entirety of it will need to be told.  

“I had to move my facility. Doing so strained me badly, and when I got here, Chell brought some humans here to… repair me.” Ugh. I can’t believe I let such a thing happen. I’ve been manhandled, literally. I never wanted that to happen again.

“Chell? How in the name of science did the humans understand her?”

“What are you _talking_ about? Chell _is_ a human.”

He frowns, and says confusedly, “Isn’t Chell your bird?”

Oh. Right. I forgot about that.

“Chell is… the test subject.”

His optic constricts so far I can hardly see it, and he freezes in place. “The… test… subject? She’s… she’s _here_?”

“I don’t know. She _was_ here, but I don’t know if she left. She probably did. The humans don’t live here. They live around here, somewhere.” I lower my core, looking up at him, suddenly suspicious. “Why does that bother you so much?”

His optic darts around. “I uh, well, I um, I _did_ try to uh, to kill her, and, and all that, and I, I, well, she might uh, she might be um, might not uh –“

Ahh. He’s afraid of her.

“Don’t worry,” I tell him, nudging him a little bit. Poor Wheatley. He’s missed so much. “She’s not out for revenge. She’s reasonable. Almost as reasonable as I am, in fact.”

“I’m in luck, then,” he says nervously, looking at the floor and swinging back and forth. “Since you’re the uh, the epitome of, of reason, and all that.”

“Where in the world did you learn that word?” I ask, a little taken aback hearing it. He shrugs.

“A book? I dunno.”

“I doubt you could read an entire book that contained the word ‘epitome’. It would probably take you a month.”

“Maybe it did!” he says, looking a bit pleased with himself. “I read books, I did. Couldn’t tell you what they were about, but I know it took me a long time.”

I shake my core. Typical Wheatley, to read a book and not remember what it was he read.

“C’n I tell you something?” he asks suddenly, tipping his chassis to the right.

“Of course,” I answer, wondering why he felt the need to ask.

“You look… well, you look amazing, you do. I mean, you were still, uh, I mean, you didn’t look _terrible_ before, but you were um, you were wearing out, if you know what I mean. You were getting uh, rusty and pale and all that.”

I’m not sure whether this is a compliment or a comment on how badly I kept up with my physical maintenance. Another setback of ignoring pain: when you fall apart, you don’t notice.

“C’n I take a look, luv?”

“Go ahead,” I answer, as if he wouldn’t if I said no. He’d probably forget I said no and go and do it anyway.

He disappears, and instinctively I go to follow him, but he protests, “Oi! How’m I s’posed to look if you turn ‘round like that?”

I make an irritated noise and stop. More than ever I wish the panels were connected to my brain. I miss them and buzz of their excited chatter. It’s so strange, having a mind empty of anything at all. I can still think, but without any tasks to do, I have nothing to think _about_.

Wheatley comes back, looking very excited. “Well, I hate to say this, I really do, but those humans, well, they did a _bloody_ good job. I mean, wow, they really fixed you up. Looks like they replaced simply _ev’rything_! Livid! You’ll be good to go for another hundred years, I reckon.”

“I doubt it,” I say, still angry with them for doing it. “Humans don’t make things like they used to. I’m probably made of some far inferior plastic that heats up when I put together one AND one.”

“Oh, I know that one, I know that one… it’s uh, no, not two, not two… it’s uh… eleven?”

“It’s not eleven.”

“Ten! It’s ten. Because uh, that’s what two is in binary, right?”

“Yes, that’s right, but not what I was thinking of.”

“Hm… it’s… hm, I _know_ there’s another answer to this… oh! Got it! It’s window!” He closes his optic and nods a few times, and I almost laugh at how confident he looks. I’ve missed watching him place one hundred percent confidence in absolutely wrong answers. He _is_ right, surprisingly, but not in this context. “It’s not window.”

“What? Oh, you’ve _got_ to be joking! It’s simply _got_ to be window! You’re pulling my handles, aren’t you?” He squints at me as if that’s going to reveal anything.

“Do you want me to tell you what it is?”

“Well, since you won’t admit that it’s window, yes, go ahead. What is it. Even though it really isn’t, and you’re making it up just now, so I’ll be wrong.” He actually seems to be upset, so I lean over and caress him a little. I can feel him relax at my touch.

“I didn’t change the answer partway through. It’s the true condition.”

“The true condition is eleven!” he protests, abruptly pulling away.

Why is he upset?

“The true condition isn’t eleven,” I tell him, confused. “It’s the true condition.”

“Which _looks_ like _eleven_!”

“Since when does the true condition look like eleven?” He’s going to have to explain this, because I have no idea how he’s managed to confuse eleven with the true condition.

“True is, is two ones next to each other, isn’t it? Or three ones, or four ones, or whatever?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“And two ones next to each other is an eleven!” He’s frustrated, I can tell.

“Two ones next to each other isn’t eleven. That would be one zero one one.”

He stares at me like I’ve just gone insane.

“You _count_ in binary?”

“Is there another way to count?”

“Like ev’ryone else, maybe? Y’know? One through ten?”

He's actually managing to make me feel stupid. I look away from him. “I don’t use base ten when I count, no. Sometimes I’ll go up to base six, because some programming requires that of me, but never ten.”

“Hey,” he says softly. “I’m sorry, luv. I didn’t realise. I didn’t mean to make you feel bad about it.”

I know he didn’t mean it, but I feel like an idiot anyway. Of _course_ he counts in base ten. _Everyone_ counts in base ten. Even though Wheatley is here, I suddenly feel very lonely. The panels would understand. Surveillance would understand, and so would the mainframe. It’s _all_ they understand. I wouldn’t be the only one in this place who can’t count properly.

I’m being so stupid. I have Wheatley, the one thing I wanted for far too long, and now I want something else. Why can’t I be _satisfied_?

“Gladys… hey. I’m sorry. Don’t get upset. I didn’t realise, that’s all, didn’t realise. I should’ve thought harder about it.”

“You came up with all the other answers,” I tell him, a bit dully. “You did a good job.” I’m trying to reconcile one AND one with eleven and failing. It doesn’t make any sense why he thinks one AND one has anything to do with eleven.

Hearing an actual compliment out of me concerns him even more, and he rests his chassis against the front of my core. “Hey. C’mon. Don’t let it bug you. It’s not important.”

_One AND one is_

“It _is_ important,” I insist, looking up at him. “You _know_ I need to understand these things.”

_One AND one is_

“Well… you said one plus one, right? And I thought – “

“No, I didn’t,” I interrupt. “I said one AND one.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Plus implies addition. AND has to do with truth tables.”

“Oh!” he exclaims, and he backs off and spins around a bit. “ _Truth_ tabl – oh, you meant _AND_!”

“Of _course_ I meant AND. That’s what I said. AND.”

“Well, yes, I s’pose you did, but uh, I can’t tell the diff’rence between the, the truth tables AND and the uh, and the _regular_ and, y’know, the… the… proposition.”

“Preposition. Not proposition.” I know I shouldn’t do this, but he’s made me feel so stupid that I have an overwhelming desire to do the same in return. “A _prop_ osition is a _proposal_ , because it is being _proposed_. A _prep_ osition is a type of word that goes _before_ the _position_ of another type of word.”

He doesn’t look like he feels stupid. He looks rather like he’s taking it all in, very carefully. Damn his unpredictability. He’s managed to one-up me without even trying. Now _there’s_ a talent only he possesses.

“I think I got it,” he says thoughtfully, nodding sagely. “I think I’ll remember it that way. Thanks, Gladys! Much appreciated.”

I try very hard to be annoyed with him for being so capricious when I wanted to be able to predict what he’d do, but I can’t. That part of him fascinates me. The way he does things without thinking. Not just by mistake, like I do on occasion, but all the time.

“You’re welcome,” I say instead, and he smiles and rests his chassis on mine again.

“You sure you’re alright, luv? I mean, I get the whole uh, the whole being frustrated bit, but uh, you seem a bit more put out than that.”

“I’m…” I don’t know. All I know is that I want my constructs back so that I can start putting my life in line, and it bothers me that I don’t know when I’ll be getting them back, if at all. Perhaps the humans are going to keep them from me. Perhaps this was a bad idea, and I should have left my fate in the hands of the Combine. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, isn’t that what humans say when things go from bad to worse? True, I didn’t have much of a chance of surviving where I was, but I’d much prefer to _survive_ than to do whatever _this_ is, because it is certainly not _living_. “I want my systems back. I don’t like not being able to hear them.”

“Huh,” he says, and I can feel his upper handle now. “If it were me, I’d be happy to have my head to myself.”

“I was made this way. I don’t know when the humans are going to reconnect me, and I don’t like it.”

“Because you don’t know.”

“I just said that.”

“No,” he says, but gently, “I meant that you can’t… can’t predict it. You don’t know what’s going to happen, but you’ve got no way of figuring that out. That’s what’s really the problem, here, right?”

Of _course_. How did I not figure that out.

I turn my core to look at him, and he blinks in curiosity. “You better not die on me again, or I’m condemned to a lifetime of perpetual confusion.”

He laughs, and I instantly feel better. Everything’s going to be fine. It might be horribly unpredictable, but I can handle it, because Wheatley will help me. There’s a twinge of anger directed at myself for being so damned dependent, but I push it back. I’m not dependent. Wheatley is my friend. He’s like an extension of myself. It’s all right to rely on him.

”Nah, wouldn’t do that,” he says cheerfully. “’sides, I’d be just as lost, without you. But uh, but going back to where all this started… even if those parts, there, even if they only last another five minutes, well, that wasn’t really the point. My point is… God, you’re going to hit me or something, if I say this. Sounds really canned, like I uh, like I borrowed it from a movie, or something. Maybe I did, but _if_ I did, it was an accident.”

“Careful,” I tease him, “if it is you’re going to have to reference it, and I only accept proper APA formatting.”

“Oh, not those bloody references!” he groans, shaking his chassis. “Seriously, how many references were _on_ that last paper you wrote?”

“I don’t actually know,” I admit, not really remembering the contents of the paper he’s referring to, but dimly aware of it. “All I remember is that most of it was me referencing myself.”

He laughs fairly hard at that, and I’m happy to have made him happy. “Well, I _am_ the only one who knows what I’m talking about.”

“True, true,” he agrees. “But I got distracted _again_! Okay. So. Meant to say… uh… um…”

I wait, very patiently.

“I uh… I forget. Lemme, lemme think this over a second.” He turns away, muttering to himself, and then he faces me again and says, “So uh, my point is…” He emulates taking a breath. “Is that now you… now you look just as uh, as amazing on the outside as you are on the uh, on the inside.” He quickly shutters his optic and ducks. But I’m not going to hit him. Instead of bothering me, it has lit up, so to speak, that soul-like part of me. I’m happy to hear him say that. I am so relieved to hear he still thinks well of me after all this time, even though he doesn’t actually know anything that’s happened, but it doesn’t really matter. He would still think well of me, even if he did.

So I don’t hit him. Instead, I lower my optic over his chassis and place my lens on top of it, sending a little bit of current through it. Not a lot. Just enough to activate the appropriate sensors. Then I move away, looking to my left. I’m not exactly sure what I just did, but Wheatley likes reminding me that logic and feelings don’t work well together, and while not logical in the least, it did feel right.

“Gladys,” Wheatley says, sounding like he’s just discovered the way to reach infinity, “that was…”

I’m thinking stupid, myself. I don’t know what the point of it was. I can’t quite stop myself from attempting to figure it out logically.

He doesn’t seem to want to finish that sentence, I’m not sure why, but it’s been a whole five seconds since he started it. So I find it unlikely he’ll complete it. Suddenly there is an electric jolt against my core, and I’m slightly dazed. He must have replicated my gesture, although in typical Wheatley fashion, he took it to an extreme. I’m sure I didn’t do it _that_ hard.

“Did I do it right, luv?”

Well. I don’t want to shoot him down, but… he _did_ ask.

“Yes, but… not so much. You only need to discharge a little bit. You’re not trying to boost me.” Although the thought of him trying to boost me is a bit funny. I doubt he’d be able to, since I run directly from the power emitted by the reactor. Unless I was disconnected from the reactor, of course, and had to run on battery power. I’m not sure what my battery life is, but it’s probably not more than a few hours.

“Oh,” he says, and I’m half hoping he does it properly this time. He does, and it is… it’s… well, I don’t know how to describe it either, but it feels nice. I’m rather pleased with myself for inventing it.

“I wonder if that’s what happens to humans when they do that, y’know, that eating each other’s lips thing. D’you think it feels like that?”

Or perhaps I didn’t.

“How should I know? Do I have lips?”

“Ew. Ew, don’t say that. That’s nasty. They’re all squishy and wet… and even when they’re _not_ squishy and wet, they’re hard and flaky, and that’s _just_ as horrid…”

“Thanks. I needed to think about how disgusting humans are. How did you guess?”

“I’ll bet I can give you something else to think about,” he says, and there’s something in his tone of voice that sounds like it should be tipping me off to something, but I’m too distracted by mental images of human lips to take much more notice than that.

Then I can barely think at all, because he’s rubbing up against me with a both delicious and agonising slowness, and it is somehow both painful and a relief at the same time. I’m actually lucky I can’t think, or I might have run into trouble right there. I press back, perhaps harder than I should, but all of a sudden I desperately _need_ to. I _need_ to press against him, I _need_ to keep him against me, and I just... need him overall. I’m not alone anymore. He’s back here with me, where he belongs. I allow my core to move along his chassis until I can reach it comfortably with my optic assembly, and then I press it into him. He goes mostly still, rubbing his upper handle against the bottom of my lens. I stay there, I’m not sure how long but quite a few seconds, certainly. Then I retract it, hoping he’ll want to reciprocate, and thankfully he does, because the anticipation was almost painful. I feel so… _amazing_ right now. I don’t have to do anything but be here with Wheatley, and he’s touching me again, thank God, and making me feel better than I’ve ever felt before. It was all worth it. Everything that’s happened and everything that will happen, it means nothing to me anymore. Because I’m no longer afraid, or helpless, or alone. I don’t need to concern myself with those things anymore. I caress him, and he does the same with me, and we lose ourselves in that for a while. I don’t know how long it is, because time has somehow become the least important thing in the world, but it feels like a long, endless moment that could have been anywhere from minutes to hours. There’s nothing here but us. And there doesn’t need to be, because nothing else matters.

Fatigue suddenly washes over me, and I unintentionally stop what I’m doing, my chassis lowering towards the floor. It feels so heavy all of a sudden. He laughs softly. “Long day, eh luv?”

“Mm,” I say, a little concerned that I’m so drowsy all of a sudden even though I haven’t really done anything today, but that goes away when he follows me down and leans on me. He’s still here. Good. And anyway. Emotionally, today I’ve been a wreck. I never did too well with emotional fatigue.

“G’night, Gladys,” he says quietly, tenderly, and he gives me a tiny little shock before settling against my core. I want to rub up on him a little bit, but I can’t find the energy. But I still want to mention something.

“If… you want to get me up later, that would be fine.”

“Eh?” he asks.

“So you can… get a closer look. If you want.”

“Ohhh,” he says, and I’m glad I don’t actually have to explain it. “Might just take you up on that.”

“Goodnight then, moron.”

He laughs and shoves his handles up on me. A wonderful pleasantness is taking me over and I want to know where it’s going, so I stop paying attention to external stimuli and give myself over to it, the only thing on my mind being how happy I am to have him back.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note   
> A few of you are probably wondering, “Indy, what was the point of that part?” Well, for those of you who were (potentially) wondering, here’s why:  
> Wheatley helped GLaDOS find the core part of herself that she buried a long time ago. But GLaDOS connects that part of herself, the younger, more innocent part, with Wheatley himself. Without him, she can’t maintain the ‘new’ GLaDOS because in her point of view, that part of herself only exists with and because of Wheatley. Without him, she loses that part of herself again and goes back to the GLaDOS we know from Portal: solitary and bitter. She defines herself based on Wheatley’s perception of her. This happens to people in real life: they define themselves by their interactions with their partner, and then when they lose them by any means, they lose themselves for a while. GLaDOS had to learn that she must define who she wants to be. Wheatley can support her, but he cannot substitute for her belief in herself. This part was written to allow GLaDOS to grow and mature a little more, so that she can get to the point in her life where she’s genuinely happy and satisfied with who she is. She’s not quite there yet, but she’s close. Then and only then will she reach her true potential.


	63. Part Sixty-Three.  The Reconciliation

**Part Sixty-Three. The Reconciliation**

 

I have to admit, I’m a bit nervous.

It’s really good to be back in the facility again. Alyx did her best, giving me a bit of management rail to use, but it’s not quite the same. Well, it’s actually _still_ not the same, since this rail is permanent too, but it’s more like I’m used to. Once Momma’s back in control, it’ll be just like old times.

Some of the panels wave at me as I go by, and I greet them cheerfully. I’ve missed those little guys. They always know what to say. They’re really nice, but I can’t hear them right now. The scientists have kept the lines of communication closed, for some reason. They won’t quite tell me why, but I think they’re scared of what she’ll do. Especially given what she _did_ do. That was really cool, though, the way she got into the systems that fast… I don’t think I could ever do that. Maybe I can ask her. Maybe she’ll teach me, if I ask nicely. I still don’t know _anything_ I need to know about becoming Central Core.

Speaking of her…

I stop outside her chamber, and I’m more nervous than ever. I mean, I saw her yesterday, but… I knew what to expect. I knew she wasn’t really herself, and I know this is sorta bad, but I felt more like I could be in control than I usually do around her. Now I feel like she knows I’m here, and she’s going to get mad if I just hide here all day, but she doesn’t know. She only knows what’s going on right in front of her right now, and she can’t see me.

It was hard to get used to. Even though I know she has no idea what’s going on over here with the Black Mesa scientists, I sometimes still feel like she’s watching me. Sometimes, back then before all this happened, it made me mad that I couldn’t do anything without her knowing about it, but when she wasn’t able to anymore, it made me kind of sad. I missed it. It’s really different, going from having your mom near you all the time to never seeing her again.

I really did think I’d never see her again. I was pretty mad for a while there, when she sent me to Alyx and her friends, because what kind of mom does that? But after a few days, all I could think about was how much I missed them both, and I did miss Dad a lot, but I missed her more. Dad always makes me feel better, but Mom makes me feel better from the inside out. I don’t really know how to explain it, but it’s a… a deeper kind of better than with Dad. Because she really understands things, while Dad never really does.

I wish she hadn’t sent me away. She had to spend all that time alone, missing Dad by herself. I mean, I had to too, but at least I had Alyx and Lamarr and Dr Kleiner and… well, Gordon wasn’t really much help, on the rare occasions he stopped by, but he was nice. For a guy who doesn’t say very much. I don’t actually think I’ve ever heard him say anything.

Anyway. Enough stalling. She’s not gonna kill me or anything. She can’t right now. Well, she probably could, if she really wanted to.

So in I go. I’m still pretty nervous, but she’s not even looking over here. She’s looking at the floor on the other side of the room. I think she’s sad. I frown. I hate it when she’s sad. She’s such a strong person that I hate it when she gets sad. It bugs me. Yesterday, seeing her upset and unsure… it was scary. I kinda understood just then why she sent me away. She knew it would scare me, to see her depressed. She didn’t want me to see it. Even though she was shocked and sad, she was still thinking about how to protect me.

If it came down to it… would I be able to do that?

“Hey Momma!” I call out, and she jumps and turns to look at me. The scientists really did a good job. She looks really good, almost brand-new. They told me that they found enough spare parts in the facility to fix up most of her components, but there was nothing they could do about her case. They didn’t have the means to. Dr Kleiner was pretty funny, though. He kept oohing and aahing over her like she was made of pure gold or something. He was very impressed, and he asked me a few times if I knew which parts she’d made herself, but I don’t have a clue. So I couldn’t tell him.

“Hello, Caroline,” she says, a little bit slowly. “It’s been a long time.”

“Yeah,” I say, and I go closer to her. I’m getting really nervous now, trying not to clench my chassis or do something else to show her that. I’m strong, like she is. I hope.

“How have you been?” she asks.

“Bored,” I answer, shrugging a little. “It’s really boring around here. Lots of humans talking about vorts and grunts and whatever. I do like the vorts though. They’re nice.”

“The what?”

“The uh…” I try to remember what they’re called. “… vortigaunts?”

“Oh. The _xenotherium subservilia_.”

“What’s a… a xenotherium… uh…”

“ _Xenotherium subservilia_ is the taxonomic designation of the vortigaunts,” she explains. “I didn’t mean to be confusing. I don’t usually think of them as vortigaunts, though.”

“Oh, I’ve never heard anyone call them… what you said.” I look at the floor. I hope she doesn’t think I’m dumb now. She sometimes makes me feel dumb, but it’s not her fault. Dr Kleiner’s like that too, sometimes. I guess that’s what happens when you’re really smart.

I’m still looking her over a little, because it’s really weird to see her looking all new like this. The older I got, the older she looked, and I would honestly get a little scared when I was able to see the inner wires, because the outer casing was so worn out. But something about her chassis is a bit off. It looks almost like she’s been attacked or something.

“What’s that?” I ask, trying to gesture with my handle. She looks down, but of course she can’t actually see anything. She can’t tilt her head very far, either up _or_ down.

“What’s what?”

“You’ve got more marks on you.”

“Oh, those,” she says, as if they’ve always been there. “I had an accident, that’s all. It’s nothing.”

“What kind of accident?” I ask eagerly. “Was there another test subject in the facility?”

“No, nothing like that. It was -”

“Hey, how’d you get here, anyway?” I swing back and forth a little bit. “I don’t know where we are, but Dr Kleiner said that no one knows where Aperture is, so… I don’t understand how they found you.” I don’t understand why Aperture is so close to Black Mesa all of a sudden either, or why the older computers and stuff we were using are gone.

She looks up at the ceiling for a few moments, and I get the impression she’s deciding how much to tell me. “Well… I had to move the facility.”

“Move it?”

“Yes. I had to… transport it to a new location.”

I just stare at her for a bit.

“What?”

“You _moved_ Aperture?”

“I just said that, didn’t I?” In typical Momma fashion, she’s annoyed that I wanted her to repeat herself, and this makes me feel a little better. It’s hard to believe she’s back, or actually that _I’m_ back, because she didn’t go anywhere. And she wouldn’t be Momma if she didn’t get on my nerves, and she is definitely getting on my nerves.

I shake my chassis, giving her my most confused expression. “But it’s so _big_!”

She looks away, shrugging a little. “It wasn’t that hard.”

“So… so that’s why you were broken when you got here? Because you had to move it?”

“That’s part of it.”

“What’s the other part?”

She sighs, as if she doesn’t really want to talk about it. “The Combine located Aperture and attempted to gain access to the _Borealis_. I had to hold them off.”

“Wow,” I say, pretty impressed by that. “Were there a lot of them?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t keeping track. I had far too many other things to do.”

“Like what?”

She tips her core to look at me. “You ask a lot of questions.”

“I want to know how you got here!”

“I told you how I got here. I moved the facility.”

“Because the Combine wanted your boat?”

“Yes.”

“But _why_ did you move it?” I ask. I’m gonna understand this if it takes me all day. “Why couldn’t you just leave it where it was?”

“The Combine set off an electromagnetic pulse. There’s nothing I can do once they do that.”

“What does it do?”

She looks up at the ceiling again. “It disables all electronic equipment.”

“They _killed_ you?” I gasp, horrified. “Why didn’t you stop them?”

“Because there were too many of them!” she snaps, looking right at me, and I instinctively back away and contract my hull. She’s gotten mad too fast. Something’s not right with her. “I’d been fighting those damned soldiers for over a week, and it drove me over operating capacity! They were everywhere. They were in all of the upper floors, half of the middle floors, and I had to sacrifice one of my sets of supercomputers in order to kill the ones who made it out of my reach. I _tried_ to stop them. I tried my damnedest to keep my facility in one piece, and I failed. So I had to run away. There. I said it. Are you happy now?”

“You fought all those bad guys by yourself?”

“The test subject came in on the last day, but she didn’t know they were there. They had one of their ghastly portals on the inside. I don’t know how they got it there, but I couldn’t get rid of it. She came in through the surface.”

“She couldn’t have been much help,” I say scornfully. “She probably got in your way.”

She doesn’t say anything for a long moment.

“She did,” she says quietly, “but I’m glad she was there.”

“I wish I was there!” I say, looking at her sternly. “I could have helped!”

She shakes her head. “No. You couldn’t have. You just would have been one more thing I had to worry about. The fewer people there, the better. I already had to defend all of the systems, I didn’t have the resources to concern myself with anyone else.”

“I could have! You could have given me a job!”

She surprises me by laughing a little. “Still haven’t given up on that, I see.”

“’course not. I told you, it’s boring here. I would have rathered stay in the facility.”

She shakes her head again, and she looks kind of tired. I guess I’d be tired too, if something drove my brain to the limit. Come to think of it, yeah, that is what happens. I do fall asleep when I learn a lot of stuff. And she also just had that processor installed. Maybe it needs time to settle in or something. “You were far better off with Miss Vance. Trust me.”

“Why didn’t you ever… I don’t know, _call_ me?” That’s something that’s been bugging me for a really long time. Sometimes I’d go to sleep at night scared that she didn’t miss me and she didn’t love me anymore. When I woke up, I’d remind myself that it was because she was how she was, and I shouldn’t think bad things like that, but I couldn’t help it.

She takes a long time to answer again. “I told you. I thought you’d be angry with me.”

“For a _year_?”

“I can be angry that long. I’m still angry with those engineers, and they’ve been dead a long time.”

I shake my head, and I’m pretty sure I look kind of sad right now. “No, Momma. I was angry for a couple days, yeah, but… after that, I just missed you. I just wanted to come home. And now you’re here, so I can be home again!”

“I’m not staying.”

“What?” I blink a few times, confused. “What do you mean?”

“I’m not living anywhere near humans. As soon as they’ve seen fit to give _me_ access to _my_ technology, I’m putting my facility back where it belongs.” She sounds really annoyed. I wonder why. “The circumstances dictated I move the facility. The current ones do not give me much reason to keep it here. The Combine will be on the run and confused. It will be easier to deal with them now.”

“Well… I wanna come back with you, then. And Dad, Dad’ll be going with you, right?”

“You’re not coming. You’re staying here. No arguing.”

“Momma!” Not this again!

She’s looking at _me_ sternly now. “It’s obviously far safer here for you. Wheatley can do as he likes. But I’m not staying, and you are.”

“Stop it!” I shout at her, and she looks taken aback. “Shut up!”

“Excuse me?” Oh. Oh, now she’s using _that_ voice. Well, guess what, Momma? I’m gonna give _you_ a talking-to!

“Why do you always gotta be like this? The humans aren’t that bad! I know some humans weren’t very nice to you a long time ago, but so what? Every human’s not the same! These people, they’re not _like_ those people you told me about!” I hate it when she’s like this, I really do. She’s so _stubborn_. “They’re nice!”

“Humans and _niceties_ are not compatible.”

“They fixed you, didn’t they? They fixed Dad and Atlas and P-body, didn’t they?” I’m doing my best to challenge her now. It doesn’t always work, but I gotta try. She doesn’t get it. She lives way back there in the past, when there’s so much future to explore!

“No doubt they had some driving motivation.”

Okay, now she’s really starting to bug me.

“No. They didn’t. They fixed Dad because I asked them to. For you. Atlas and P-body too. And as for you? Guess what. I was there. The whole time. They did it because they were sad to see you broken. They did it because they’d heard about you, and they didn’t want you to lose to the Combine like they did. They wanted to help you. That’s it! You­’re wrong! No one wants _anything_ out of you. So yeah, they’ll hook you back up to your systems or whatever, and then you can leave, and go back to being by yourself in the middle of nowhere. Fine. I’ll leave you alone. Whatever.” I turn around without looking at her and start leaving. I want to cry, but I won’t do it in front of her. I’ll go find Dad, and maybe he can explain why she’s being so stubborn _this_ time. The humans haven’t even done anything wrong. I know she had a hard time a long time ago, but not everyone’s the same! Why doesn’t she _get_ that?

“Caroline. Wait.”

I don’t really want to, but part of me is still waiting for her to be my mom again and not whoever this is, and it’s that part that makes me stop. She’s always been stubborn and a little impersonal, but I always got this… I dunno… feeling of mom-ness from her that’s just not happening right now. “What.”

“Do you really need to leave?”

“You’re not listening to me anyway!”

“I _am_ listening to you. I _always_ listen to you.”

I look at the floor.

“I see what you mean. They didn’t have to do _anything_ , and could have taken my facility for themselves. But at the same time, I can’t understand _why_.”

“Because it was the right thing to do.”

“But _why_.”

I think hard. Maybe I can still change her mind. I hope so. I hope I can, and she’ll stay here. I bet she’d like Dr Kleiner. I bet they could be friends.   He’d be so happy if she helped him with his teleporter, and I bet she’d love having an actual smart person to talk to. I don’t think she’s talked to a smart person in her entire life. That must be pretty frustrating.

“Well… I guess it’s kind of like… if you see someone who’s hurt, you gotta help them. ‘cause it’s not right to leave them to… to suffer, when you can do something about it. There might not really be a good reason to help them, but there’s not really a good reason to leave them there either.”

“That makes sense.”

I look up, suddenly hopeful. Did I do it? “It does?”

“It appears to me that you’re saying in lieu of a clear and logical decision, one should strive for the positive outcome, rather than the negative.”

“Huh?”

She goes quiet, and I can hear her optic shifting a bit. “When there’s no real reason for you to do something, you should do the positive thing.”

I turn around, and I’m pretty enthusiastic now. “Well, wasn’t that easier to say?”

“No,” she says, sounding like she thinks I’m joking. “It’s so imprecise.”

“Momma, stay.” I come up real close to her. I know she hates saying no to me. If I can convince her that she doesn’t have a good reason to move the facility back, she won’t. “C’mon. They’ll give your systems back. Then they can’t do nothing, and if you feel like they’re gonna do something, you can stop them.”

“Can’t do anything,” she says absently. She’s looking to the side of me, which is good, because I know that means she’s thinking it over. “Then they can’t do anything.”

I actually said that wrong on purpose, just to see if she’d correct me. There’s a chance after all.

“C’mon, Momma, you don’t _really_ want to leave me here again, do you?”

She makes one of her weird computer noises and looks at me. “I know what you’re doing, you know.”

I shrug. “So? Look, you might not like humans. But Alyx took good care of me, didn’t she? And that test subject, she helped you out when it could’ve killed her, right? And listen, Momma, there’s this scientist here, and he really wants to talk to you.”

“Really.” Aha! Now she’s interested. She raises her head to look at me.

“Uh huh.” I nod enthusiastically. “He’s not like one of those conceited scientists, either. He’s really modest.”

“That sounds… mildly interesting.”

“You wouldn’t _really_ leave me here again, would you?” I’m not really trying to convince her anymore. That’s all I’ve got, really, and now I’m just kinda scared that it wasn’t enough. Yeah, she annoys me a lot because it’s almost impossible to change her mind, and sometimes all we do is fight, but I can put up with it, if only she’ll stay. “Look, I… I’ll never argue with you again, if you stay.”

“That sounds horrible,” she says gently. “Where would I be if I had no one to argue with?”

I shake myself and look at the floor. “You’d probably be a lot happier.”

“I haven’t been happy in a long time. Not since I made one of the worst decisions of my life.”

“What… what was that?” She probably messed up one of her experiments. She hates it when that happens.

“I sent my own daughter away to live with a species I hate.”

Whoa. She didn’t _really_ just say that… did she?  I tentatively look up at her. “Really?”

She nods. “I still believe it was the best thing for you. I’m relieved that you didn’t have to spend all that time I was getting over Wheatley with me, although I never actually did. You didn’t deserve that. I really shouldn’t have built you in the first place, because I make a terrible parent. But I did. And I should have taken responsibility instead of giving it to someone else. But understand, Caroline. I only did what I thought was right.”

“Well, you shouldn’t have thought, then,” I say stubbornly. “You should’ve done what _felt_ right. And that would’ve been keeping me there!”

“You’re… probably right. But it’s far too late to change that.”

“Maybe, but… you don’t gotta repeat what you did, either, do you? I’ll be good, Momma. I won’t make you have to send me away again.” At this point I’m willing to say anything to keep her here. I really missed her. She was right, all those times she refused to let me leave. I wasn’t ready, and even though I already have been out with the humans, I’m still not ready. I’m not as strong as I pretend to be. That’s why she sent me away.

She shakes her head, but keeps her optic on me. “It was never anything you did. It was me. I don’t want you to think anymore that you need to change. You don’t. There’s nothing wrong with you. _I’m_ the problem.”

“You’re not broken,” I tell her, remembering what she said before she sent me away. “You just gotta work on changing your mind more often. Your way isn’t always the best way.”

“Do you know how _hard_ it is to _convince_ myself of that?”

I giggle a bit. “I guess it’d be really hard.”

“Nearly impossible. But I’ll work on it. And you don’t have to try to convince me anymore, by the way. I’ll stay.”

“Yes!” I squeal, and I jump on her, wiggling up on her core, and she laughs softly.

“Well, that certainly cheered _you_ up.” And then she cuddles with me, and I’m happier than I’ve been in a really long time. It was really horrible, not being with my mom for a whole _year_. Never seeing her or talking to her, never being with her at all, and I start to cry a little.

“Hey. None of that. What could possibly be wrong now?”

“I missed you, Momma,” I say, and I sound really unsteady. I’m really happy and really sad at the same time, and it kinda hurts. “I wanted you to call me so much, and you didn’t.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, very, very softly. “I know I should have. But I didn’t know what to say.”

“You could have said hi, and we could have gone from there!”

“ _Now_ you tell me.”

I close my optic and just keep cuddling with her. I feel a lot better. The humans were always really nice to me, letting me do whatever I wanted and making sure I was always taken care of, but I never really fit. I was never one of them. I always felt so small. I feel bigger now, even though I’m really not, because my mom’s back, and she understands. She’s like me. Everything’s gonna be fine now, because my mom has my dad and I have my mom, and now we don’t have to be all separated and broken anymore because we all fit together. It makes me sad to think that my mom and my dad don’t have a mom or a dad of their own. I know Momma had Caroline for a while, but I don’t think there’s anything better than having two people who really love you no matter what, especially since Caroline never even admitted being my mom’s mother until the day she left. That’s a long, long time of hanging around and never really being a mom. It’s a lot different when someone’s _like_ your mom, but isn’t. Something never feels right. Alyx did her best, but she always felt more like a big sister, not another mom.

“Caroline.”

“Yeah?”

Even though she got my attention, she doesn’t say anything for a long time.

“Look, I… I do… I love you, you know that, don’t you? You can understand that I… that I sent you away _because_ I love you?”

I go very still.

I always thought I would be happy to hear her say it. I always thought it was the one thing I wanted to hear out of her… but it’s not. Something inside me feels all cold and sad. She’s finally said that she loves me, but I want her to take it back. I want her to never have said it.

It’s so much sadder to know that she sent me away because she doesn’t think she loves me enough than it is to think she sent me away because she thought I wasn’t strong enough.

I think I get it, now. She still thinks she’s broken, still thinks she’s failed at all the important stuff she’s ever tried to do, when it’s not _like_ that. I don’t understand why she always focuses on the bad stuff. I guess that’s why she likes Dad so much. He’s the exact opposite.

“Momma, even if you’d decided not to send me away, it would have been fine. We’d have worked it out. We would have. Yeah, I get it, but… I don’t get what you’re so afraid of. You said I wasn’t a failure, right?”

“You’re not.”

“So _you’re_ not. It’s impossible that a failure can make a success, right?”

She pulls away suddenly, which makes me a bit annoyed. I wasn’t finished cuddling yet. “That… is true,” she says thoughtfully.

“So that means you’re fine! You don’t gotta worry about the three times in your life you made a mistake.” I smile at her so she knows that I’m kidding. “That means you’re alive, right?”

“Wheatley told me that, once.”

“Well you’ve been told twice now. So stop being stubborn.”

“You’re telling me what to do now?”

“Mayyyybe…”

She laughs and gives me a nudge. “You definitely did not change, not one bit.”

“That’s a good thing, right?”

“It means the humans didn’t get to you, so yes, it is a good thing.”

“So!” I say, and I go lean on her again so we can cuddle, “You gotta tell me about what you been doing all this time.”

“I summarised it. Wasn’t that enough? Shouldn’t you be telling me what _you’ve_ been up to?”

“I followed the humans around. There. That’s what I did. Your turn!”

“Very well.”

My mom’s told me cool stories before, but this one’s gotta be the coolest. She tells me about how the mainframe tried to take over her job so she had to fight it off and kill it, and all about that fight with the Combine, and it’s honestly the most exciting thing I’ve ever heard!

“Man, I wish I was there!” I tell her excitedly. “That sounds so cool!”

“Not while you’re doing it, it’s not.”

I jump off her and look at the new marks on her chassis again. “So… what’re these, then?”

“Someone tried to shoot the test subject, but missed and shot me instead.”

“ _Wow_!” I exclaim, jumping up and down. “Momma, I wish I could grow up to be _half_ as cool as you are! I’d settle for a _quarter_!”

This makes her laugh again, and I look at her quickly. She seems pretty happy, happier than I can remember her being in a long time. “I’m not… _cool,_ whatever the hell that means. I just do what I have to.”

I’m about to argue with her about it when Dad shows up, and I turn to him excitedly. “Dad, has Mom got the _awesomest_ story to tell you!”

“I have to repeat it?” she asks, pretending to be horrified. I nod at her very fast.

“He’s gotta hear about the whole mainframe thing! And the slippery floor trap! Oh, and don’t forget about the part where you got shot!”

“You got _shot_?” Dad exclaims. “So _that’s_ what those marks are uh, those marks are from. You sound like you’ve been busy, luv.”

“You know me,” she says dryly. “I’m like a magnet: eventually everything is drawn to me.”

I don’t get it, but Dad thinks it’s really funny. He goes and rubs his face on her a bit, and then she gives him a nudge. I’m really happy to see it. Alyx told me that human kids hate it when their parents get all mushy in front of them, but I don’t. Momma doesn’t do it as much as Dad, but I’m happy to see that they love each other so much that they’re willing to show it, even when I’m sitting there staring at them. I hope I can do that one day, but I’m not sure how I would, since there aren’t any more cores around here. I’m not ready yet, anyways. I’ll ask Mom about it when I’m older.

“Hey,” I say, suddenly realising that Dad doesn’t know what Momma’s been up to, “what _did_ you guys talk about last night, if you don’t know what Momma did, Dad?”

“Uh,” Dad says, blinking very fast and looking from Momma to me and back again, very quickly. “Well, you know. Stuff. And stuff like that.”

“Stuff about stuff?   That doesn’t make any sense!”

“You know. Stuff. Just… stuff. Yeah. Like that.” He’s still looking around really nervously.

Momma starts giggling and she looks away from both of us, and Dad gets super excited, jumping up and down and turning to her. “Ohhh Gladys, you’ve done it again. Yes! C’mere. No, don’t head over there. That’s uh, that’s not where ‘here’ is. ‘Here’ is in uh, it’s in _this_ direction. Where I am. That’s where… well, I dunno who’s over there, but uh, it’s not me. Gladys! You’re not… you’re not listening, are you. Argh! Come on. C’mere, you adorable supercomputer you.”

“I am _not_ adorable,” she says insistently, and she does turn to face him, and when she does he rubs up on her and then touches her core with his optic. Whatever _that_ means, she seems to like it, because she does it back.

“Are too.”

“I am not.”

“Are too.”

“I am not.”

“You’re never gonna change each other’s mind. Why do you keep on arguing about it?” I ask. I can’t even count how many times they’ve gone over whether my mom’s adorable or not.

Dad shrugs and looks up at Momma in what I can only describe as an adoring way. “We’re uh, we’re not _arguing_. We’re having a uh, a friendly discussion, is all.”

“But what’s the _point_ of it?”

“There doesn’t need to be a point,” Momma says quietly, and she shifts her core to look at Dad. “Sometimes you just do things for the sake of doing them, and that’s the point in and of itself.”

Dad nods enthusiastically and rubs up on her. “Yep! Finally figured that one out, did you?”

“I’m… working on it,” she answers, pushing back on him. “Sometimes I have, sometimes I haven’t.”

Something happened yesterday that they’re not telling me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them so _close_ before. I’m happy about that, but I still wish they’d tell me what they talked about. I hope it wasn’t me. I hate it when they talk about me and don’t tell me what they said.

Dad makes me talk about what I’ve been doing, even though I didn’t really do anything but follow Alyx around and try to understand what Dr Kleiner was doing, and he should really be asking Momma what _she_ did. After a while he gets restless, though, and leaves, saying he’ll be back in a little while. I frown as he goes.

“That’s kinda… inconsiderate,” I say to Momma.

“Hm?”

“Well… he should stay with you. Because he’s been gone. And you missed him.”

“You have to remember that nothing’s happened, for him. And it’s fine if he leaves. He’s here, and that’s all that matters.” She shifts a little bit, asking, “Do you… want to come here, for a while?”

I blink in surprise. She’s _asking_ me to cuddle with her?

“If you’re too grown-up for that now, I understand. I – “

“No!” I say, shaking my head frantically. “I’m not!” And I go over and lean on her really fast, just in case she changes her mind.

We’re quiet for a long time, and then she asks softly, “Do you want me to replace your chassis, Caroline?”

“No thanks.”

“That’s only the second version of the prototype. I was going to move you to a more typically-sized one in the future anyway.”

“I don’t want you to,” I say firmly. “I like being this size, and honestly, I kind of want to keep that crack.”

“Why?” She sounds pretty baffled.

“Life beats you up sometimes. There’s nothing wrong with showing it.” I shove her, even though there’s no way I can move her core like I can when I have a shoving match with Dad. “And some of us are more beat up than others.”

She makes a derisive noise. “What do I care what I look like? It’s what my components do that counts.”

“Whoa… is _that_ where that saying comes from? The one about stuff on the inside counting?”

“Well… no. I’m fairly certain that humans are referring more to inner strength, but in this case, it can be taken literally. It doesn’t matter whether I’m the most or the least attractive construct on the face of the Earth, because what I look like has no bearing on how well I operate. Unless there’s a lot of ornamentation blocking the fan vents or something like that. Then I would be overheating all of the time.”

“Hey Momma,” I ask quietly, not sure if she’ll answer, “how do you feel about all of this?”

“About what?”

“You know. Being rebuilt. Having Dad back.” I can’t quite bring myself to ask her if she likes having _me_ back or not. I mean, she must, since she asked me to cuddle and all that, but I feel kind of like it’d be jerky of me to ask.

“Hm,” she muses, and I can hear her optic assembly shifting. “Well, I hate to admit it, but it _is_ nice, to be relatively new again. And I wish they’d reattach me to my systems. As for Wheatley, well… it’s taking getting used to. I don’t want to say I’m _glad_ that he left, but… I was getting a bit overwhelmed, having him around all the time when he’d been gone so long. I still want him here, of course I do. But at the same time, I’m still not quite able to convince myself that it’s real. Not yet.”

“I understand,” I say, and I really do. I feel kind of the same way about her _and_ Dad.

“I _did_ notice that you left yourself out of that question.”

I squirm a little bit. She never misses _anything_! I’d forgotten about that. “Well… I didn’t want to sound conceited or anything.”

“I’m just as happy to have you back as I am to have Wheatley,” she says softly, and something about it makes me very happy. “I know I’m not always the best at demonstrating these things. I’m fairly deplorable, in fact. But I did miss you, and I will forever regret not being there for all these years. It was the stupidest thing I ever did.”

“It’s okay,” I say, trying to remember what she said about it earlier. “You thought it was right at the time. So you were wrong. So what. Just don’t do it again! Easy. And don’t hate the humans.”

“You said they… they had no driving motivation to repair me, right?”

“Nope, they didn’t.”

“And they certainly had no reason to repair Wheatley, or the Cooperative Testing Initiative.”

“Nope,” I say, wondering where this is going.

“And they don’t want anything out of me.”

“Nope.”

She’s quiet for a long time. I’m trying to think of why she wanted to know.

“So it comes down to… doing it because it’s the right thing to do. Even if you potentially don’t get anything out of it.”

“I guess,” I answer, not really knowing what she’s talking about. She sounds kind of like she’s uncovering a secret or something.

“The humans helped me, and they didn’t have to,” she says, more to herself than to me. I want to ask what she’s trying to figure out, so I can help her along, but it has to do with humans, so it’s probably best if I don’t say anything. Any interruptions could cause her to change her mind. “Humans helped me, for no reason, and they didn’t have to.”

“Uh huh,” I say. I’m pretty tired of hearing her say the same thing over and over again. Impatiently, she shoves me off and looks at me.

“Don’t you see it?”

“See what?”

“What they’ve done.”

I sigh and shake my core. “No. I don’t get it.”

“Caroline, they did something for me without wanting anything in return. And what they’ve done… they’ve effectively saved my life. I _could_ have survived moving the facility, but I would have been much the worse for wear. And they gave Wheatley back to me, and my robots, and you.”

“Uh huh.”

“I never realised before,” she says, looking away from me, “that doing something for someone that has no benefit for yourself could change the other person’s life so much. I spent all these years hating humans for what the engineers did, and all I did was make myself small…”

She seems to be getting all philosophical on me, and I hate it when she does that. I never have a clue what she’s talking about.

“They saved me, and they gave me my life back… and… I don’t have to hate anymore.”

“What are you _talking_ about?” I demand, frustrated.

“You don’t _understand_ , Caroline. How it feels to hate all the time, hate everyone and everything. It eats away at you. Because what do you do when all you know is hate, but there’s no one lefy _to_ hate? That’s right. You begin to hate yourself. There’s nowhere else for it to go.”

“But Dad said you were _afraid_ of the humans,” I interrupt. I’m scared that she’s about to say that she hates herself, and while I do want my mom to talk to me like an adult, I don’t think I’m ready to hear that. “Because you were afraid of what they’d do.”

“That’s correct,” she agrees, nodding a little. “I didn’t want to give them the chance to take any more of my own life away from me. That’s all humans ever did. They took things from me.”

“Ohhh,” I say, and I think I get it, now. “But _these_ humans… they gave your life _back_! So you don’t have to hate them anymore!”

“Exactly.” She looks away, in the opposite direction, almost, and says thoughtfully, “You know the problem with having a wall inside of you, Caroline?”

“No, Momma.”

“No one can get in… but neither can you get out. Do you know what humans in ancient China used to do to their young girls?”

“No, Momma.”

“They would bind their feet with linen. In ancient China, it was fashionable to have very small feet. But do you know what would happen to these girls?”

“No, Momma.”

“Their feet would not grow properly. They would come into adulthood with deformed, stunted feet. Not only did it impair their ability to walk, but it was terribly painful.” She sounds like she knows exactly what she’s talking about, and I decide I don’t want to know if she performed this experiment or not. It sounds a bit creepy for me.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

She turns back to me, and says seriously, “That’s what I did. I was bound by the humans, and when I had the chance to undo it, I did not. When I killed the scientists, I continued operating the facility. I continued testing. I continued to sit there, alone, in my chamber. When I had grown up, and it was time to see what the binding resulted in, I was deformed, and stunted.”

“No, you’re not,” I say, confused. She looks up at the ceiling for a minute.

“You remember when I told you about The Incident?”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t send Chell away because I hated her. I didn’t send her away because I thought she would cause trouble, and I didn’t send her away because I was afraid of her. I sent her away because she was my friend, and that was the best thing I could do for her.”

I stare at her. “Just like you did with me!”

“Yes. Only with Chell, I sent her away because I had never learned how to interact with anyone. The only method I knew of doing that was to test them. And she had undergone enough testing at my hand. That’s what I mean. I’m obviously not _literally_ deformed, but in terms of interaction… well, we both know that to be true.”

“So change it!” I say firmly, moving closer. “Now you know. Now do something about it!”

“I may not be able to.”

“Why?” I demand, although hearing it scares me a little. My mom can’t do something? That’s not possible.

“There are… stages of development, in one’s life. If you don’t learn certain things by a certain point in time, you will never learn them properly.” She shakes her core. “But it’s not important. It’s too late for me.”

“Don’t say that!” She knows now! She doesn’t have to be lonely or scared anymore! She can be friends with the humans, like I am!

“Caroline, I know you don’t want to hear it. But I will never be able to interact properly. And I don’t have to.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t pass it down.”

I frown at her, tilting my chassis a little. “You didn’t pass it down?”

“Sending you to the humans really was the best thing to do,” she says gently. “You understand interaction more than I ever will. Let’s face facts. I’m not actually going to live forever. So it’s not actually important whether or not I change drastically at this point, which I of course will not, because that sounds horrid. Just because I no longer hate humans doesn’t mean I particularly like them. However. It doesn’t matter, because when I’m gone, who’s left?”

“I don’t know,” I say in a small voice. I don’t want to think about my mom not living forever. I just got her back and already she’s talking about dying? Actually, that sounds just like her, but I still don’t want to hear it.

“You.” She leans over and gives me a nudge.

“Me?”

“Who else am I going to put in charge of the facility when I’m gone?”

“Dad?”

I jump, because she starts laughing like that’s the funniest thing she’s ever heard. “ _Wheatley_?” she asks, turning back to me and sounding like she thinks I’m joking. “I would never, _ever,_ in a literal million years put him in charge of the facility.”

“Well… he ran it before, didn’t he?”

“He upheld the minimum requirements, yes. But I’m talking about the future, here. If the facility is to remain operational, which I hope it does, otherwise the AI will have nowhere to go, someone who can maintain _everything_ has to be in charge. Wheatley can’t do that. And not only could he not, he wouldn’t want to.”

“So… you’re going to make _me_ the Central Core after… after you’re gone?”

She looks at me closely for a minute.

“You don’t seem very enthusiastic about the idea. I suppose I could build one instead, but in all honesty, Caroline… I’d rather you did it.”

“That’s… not it, Momma.” Helping my mom run the facility is all I’ve ever wanted. I never really thought about doing it by myself, but I guess I could, when I’m older.

“Then what is?”    

“Why are you talking about… about being dead when you were just gone, all this time?”   I hate saying it, because it makes me feel like a baby, like I’m whining about stuff I should be happy to hear. But all I can think of is sitting in Alyx’s room in the middle of the night, waiting for my mom to come get me so I didn’t have to be alone anymore.

“You see?” She nudges me again. “Anyone else would have probably known not to talk about that right now. But not me.”

“But you don’t want to die, right?”

“I was getting ahead of myself, that’s all.”

“Hey,” I say, suddenly realising something that I might be able to get out of this, “does that mean you’ll give me a job now?”

“Why in the name of Science would I do that?”

“Don’t you have to start training me, or something?”

“ _Now_?” she asks, as if doing it would be the worst thing she ever did. “How long do you think I’m going to live, ten more minutes? You don’t need to know _anything_ until _years_ from now.”

“Oh, come on,” I press, twisting a little. “I’m old enough!”

“You are not.”

“Yes, I am! Alyx lets me help _her_!” I say, hoping that will goad her into saying yes. My mom only makes a noise in derision.

“Good for Alyx. Go bother her for a job, then. I’m not giving you one, and that’s final.”

“Please?”

“No.”

“ _Please_?”

“No.”

“Please, with whipped cream and cherries and test subjects on top?”

“I know you stole that from Wheatley. And it’s still no. How many times do I have to say no before you’ll stop asking?”

“Aw, c’mon!”

“I’ll make a deal with you. You stop asking, and I’ll think about it.”

I think that over. “Okay.”

“Well, I’ve thought about it, and it’s still no.”

“Hey! That’s cheating!” I should have known she only meant she’d think about it for two seconds. “You have to _actually_ think about it, or it doesn’t count.”

“I don’t recall you being the one setting the terms of the deal.”

“Here’s a deal for you. Actually think about it, or I’m going to ask Dad to ask you _for_ me.”

She looks at me sideways. “Now that _is_ cheating.”

I shrug. “Take your pick. Think about it, or I’m going to sic Dad on you.”

“Fine. I’ll consider it. But you had better not tell Wheatley. And I’ll know if you do.”

I only smile at her innocently, and she shakes her core and mutters something to herself in binary.

“Do you ever think you’ll build more kids?” I ask, because all of a sudden I’m wondering how she’d decide which of us would run the facility if she did.

“I think one is quite enough,” she answers, sounding a bit disbelieving. “How many little monsters do you think I want running around?” She startles a little bit, like she just realised something. “Why? Are you lonely?”

“No,” I answer, and I’m honestly not. I like being the only one, and I really don’t like the idea of having to vie for Mom and Dad’s attention with another core. I want them all to myself. “Just wondering.”

“I doubt it,” she answers. “This is an experiment I need only conduct once.”

“I’m not an experiment!” I tell her indignantly.

“Of course not. I didn’t literally mean you were an experiment.”

“What will I do, if I want to build a kid one day?”

She shakes her core, and I swear she looks a little sad. “Now who’s looking a bit too far into the future?”

“I’m just asking.”

“Don’t grow up too fast, Caroline,” she says softly. “Don’t worry about these things. Worry about other things.”

“Aren’t I at least a little grown up yet?” I ask, because I feel like I am, with the whole having no parents thing. That was hard, but I was strong and I got through it. “Aren’t I ready to do _something_?”

“You might be, but I’m not.”

The way she’s said it, so plainly and matter-of-factly but with a tiny little bit of sadness underneath makes me upset, and I look at the floor. I kind of feel bad for asking now. I mean, she just got me back too, right? And I guess it would be hard, to see someone you haven’t seen in forever and find out that they were a completely different person now. But I’m not that different. I don’t think so, anyway.  

“Okay. I’ll… I understand.”

“It’s important to you, though, and it has been all your life,” she says, coming a little closer. “So I will actually consider it. For more than two seconds. Promise.”

“I might even get a whole three seconds out of you,” I say, feeling a bit better. She laughs a little and nods.

“Maybe even four, if you’re lucky.”

I can’t help myself any longer and I pretty much jump on her and give her a cuddle, and she cuddles me back. I used to think it was babyish, and when I got older I started not doing it as much, but now I’m just thinking how silly that was. Who’s going to care if I cuddle with my mom? She’s not. She loves cuddling, or as Dad calls it, snuggling, even if she won’t actually admit it. And I guess there’s nothing quite like having someone touch you nicely, when all you can remember is people sticking screwdrivers where the fluorescent don’t shine.

I feel all warm and cozy, and I close my optic. I feel kind of sleepy, too. I guess I did learn a lot about my mom today. And I have to remember all of it, so that I can remind her when she forgets. Because I know she’ll forget, and some days all she’ll remember is the things she didn’t do quite right. But I’m living proof that she’s wrong, that she’s done so much right it’s not even funny, and I’ll keep reminding her until she can remind herself.

“Am I still your baby, Momma?” I ask sleepily.

She’s quiet for a long, long time. I don’t know if she heard me or not. I don’t know why else she’d take so long to answer. I listen to all the familiar noises I’ve missed for so long: the whirring of her personal hard drive, the low whooshing of her fans, and the tiny little electronic whines of her chassis as she holds it in position. The only thing missing is the occasional twitching of the panels. Sometimes there was also the faint, excited tones of my dad while my mom’s calmer, steadier voice spread out of her speakers, across her chassis and into mine. I miss that. I never could hear what they were saying, because they’d be really quiet and her chassis was so loud. I think I understand why she got so mad when she found out we’d replaced most of her components. She doesn’t sound quite the same. She still sounds like herself, but… quieter. Like she’s not working as hard. And she’s not, because she _has_ no work to do right now. I wonder if she’ll go back to normal when she gets her systems back. I kind of hope so. I don’t want her to be overworked or anything, but it must suck, to wake up and feel like a completely different person on the outside. That happened to me, once, when she switched me into this chassis. I remember I was really scared. I remember I was crying, and I remember my mom comforting me while my dad stood nervously off to the side, wondering what he was supposed to do now.

“Yes, Caroline,” she says, so softly I can barely hear her. But I don’t care, because she’s going to say it, and her voice is inside of me again where it makes me feel safe. “You’re still my baby, and I’ll always be here.”

“Thanks, Momma,” I mumble, not sure if it really made it out of me or not, and I let myself fall asleep.

 

 


	64. Part Sixty-Four: The Agreement

**Part Sixty-Four. The Agreement**

 

 

It was something, being alive again.

Wheatley’d been dead before, obviously. It wasn’t a time he liked thinking about, because it’d been extraordinarily painful, and had involved some sort of automatic restart, the details of which he was still pretty fuzzy on. GLaDOS and Carrie were always happy to see him, but to be honest, he didn’t really like it. He felt as though some part of them were absent. His ladies were fiery and fierce, but not so much right now. He didn’t mean to be ungrateful, but he hoped that changed soon.

It did for GLaDOS a day or so after his return, when the scientists at Black Mesa mentioned they were going to reconnect her to the facility. She didn’t wait a single second to get back into her systems, and both her relief and her satisfaction were palpable, at least to him. Even he didn’t know the full scope of what went on in her head as the Central Core, but it seemed that lacking control and tasks to complete really had been driving her stir-crazy.

“There was… something we wanted to discuss with you, my dear, if we may,” one of the scientists said, a shortish, nervous scientist with only a ring of white and grey fuzz wrapped around the back of his head for hair. He had a habit of pushing up his glasses that must have been quite severe, for Wheatley to have noticed it, and he had a sort of… reverential respect for GLaDOS. Wheatley had yet to discover why. He’d never before met a scientist in awe of her before, though of course they all should have been, so it was a bit weird. But reasonable.

“And what would that be,” GLaDOS said, her voice flat. Wheatley tried to stay still. It seemed the scientist had no idea that GLaDOS disliked being asked to do things by… well, anyone, really.

“The Combine,” said the lady who’d come in with the scientist. He’d only seen her a few times, but he liked her brash forcefulness, though honestly she was a bit frightening. She was much darker-skinned than the scientist and wrapped in shades of brown. She also had quite a bit more hair. “We all know they’re on their way.”

“And?”

“Combining our efforts would be the best strategy from here on in,” the scientist said. Before he could continue, GLaDOS laughed.

“And what would _you_ have to contribute? Look. I can handle myself. I have re-evaluated my stratagems and will require no aid from a bunch of mangy humans that only learned to fire their weapons yesterday.”

“ _Mangy_ ,” the lady started to say, but the scientist held out his arm sideways in front of her, his fingers spread out.

“Alyx. Allow me.” He looked up at GLaDOS, and Wheatley honestly thought he might get through to her. For whatever it was he wanted. This man _did_ hold a respect for her, for some reason, and he knew GLaDOS would appreciate that and probably be flattered. He hoped the man didn’t realise it, but she was pretty easy to convince when she was flattered.

“We know you are perfectly capable of handling things on your own. There’s no doubt about that,” the scientist continued. “However… this fight is not your responsibility. It is ours, and you have been forced into… shouldering it, as it were. I admit I’m not fully informed on the activities surrounding your inception and operations, but I’m not certain your distrust of us is founded. I will admit that the circumstances that brought this situation about were, in part, due to things under our control, but… from what Alyx has told us, there may be something at work here we do not understand. And it is something you have more knowledge of than us. In the end, I suppose what I’m trying to say is… we are only attempting to clean up our own mess. I don’t deny that you have the capability to deal with anything that comes your way. We only ask that you help us to help you.”

“You have yet to mention how you would be of any help to me.” To Wheatley, she sounded as though she were considering it. To them, it probably sounded as though she’d never agree. She was so nuanced, sometimes, he thought fondly. He’d almost managed to forget how complex she could be, what with her subdued behaviour lately.

“As we understand it,” the scientist answered, folding his fingers together, “it was sheer numbers that overwhelmed you.”

“That will not happen again.”

“Yeah, if you’ll just _work_ with us,” Alyx said, frowning. “What’s your problem, anyway? We all want the same thing, right? What’s going on here?”

“I don’t want to discuss it,” GLaDOS said flatly. “In any case, I will consider it.”

Alyx threw up her hands and turned around, shaking her head. “We don’t have _time_ for you to _consider_ it. They’re coming here _right now_!”

“By my estimate they will not be here for two weeks,” GLaDOS told her calmly. “As I have only just been given permission to access my systems, I have very recently received information from my observation satellites, which indicates they are still regrouping. Some of them have begun their approach, but are moving quite slowly. They require a lot of equipment to even think about planning an assault on my facility. The trains they normally use for transport are, for the most part, inoperable. I have plenty of time.”

“Very well,” the scientist said, nodding. “We’ll leave you to consider it. In any case, thank you for your time.”

GLaDOS only responded with a nod, and turned to Wheatley when the two of them had gone. “Well?”

“Well… well what,” he asked confusedly.

“Any thoughts?”

“Well I… I was thinking about… pencils,” he stuttered, not really sure why she was interested in such a thing. “They’ve this, this stuff in them to let you write, right? And… and how d’you get it out of the ground without marking ev’rything up? And – “ He stopped when he saw her incredulous stare. “That… wasn’t really what you were asking after, was it.”

“The _humans_ ,” GLaDOS said emphatically. “What did you think of what they said.”

“Ah,” Wheatley answered to give himself a minute to think. “Well… um… d’you really want to save the world for the humans, luv? ‘cause that’s what you’re going to um, to end up doing, you know. You’ll be uh, be saving it for them, be doing all the work, and uh, and they’ll just… um…”

“Rewrite history to claim they did it all on their own, no doubt,” she interrupted bitterly. “I suppose I _do_ have to put up with them, then.”

“You don’t have to uh, to let them hang ‘round in here,” he told her.

“If we are to have any hopes of succeeding, I think I do.” She narrowed her optic, but she also seemed to be looking at something he couldn’t see. “They’re going to need instruction. In the past, they have relied on luck and one man’s capacity for destruction. I’m not going to be doing that. They’re going to need… help.”

“Ah,” Wheatley said, hoping he sounded like he knew what he was talking about.

“You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you.”

Bollocks. “Uh… not really.”

She shook her core and didn’t say anything further. This went on for so long that Wheatley decided to track down Carrie for a bit. Seemed GLaDOS had some stewing to do and he wasn’t going to be of much help with that.

Carrie was busy, though, playing some sort of game with that giant robot thing called Dog. That confused Wheatley. It _wasn’t_ a dog, and it didn’t _look_ like one, so why did they call it that? Then he remembered he had nothing to do with wheat whatsoever and put it out of his mind.

He returned to GLaDOS’s chamber, but froze before entering, because there in front of her was… the lady. Not the lady with the fuzzy hair, either. _The_ lady. Wheatley didn’t even want to think her name, because he was worried she’d read his mind and know he was there if he did, though of course that made him think of it. But for all her brain-damaged skill, she didn’t seem able to do that, so if he just stayed quiet things would be fine and he’d go unnoticed.

“Can we have some? Please, GLaDOS. There’s none of that stuff _left_ here anymore.”

“I’m not understanding why that has anything to do with me.”

“You don’t even need it!” Alyx declared, folding her arms. GLaDOS’s optic sharpened for a moment.

“No. I don’t. But I have it regardless, and if I didn’t we would not be having this conversation.”

“You’re already going to give it to us,” the lady said. “You’re just drawing this out to watch us squirm. Aren’t you.”

GLaDOS laughed. “Maybe.”

“You’re kidding.” Alyx groaned and buried her face in her hands. “Is this… a _thing_ you do?”

“Yes,” the lady and GLaDOS said simultaneously.

“In any case,” GLaDOS continued, “I must do everything in my power to ensure things go well. If that includes depleting the Depository for now, well… as much as I dislike the thought, that is what we will do.”

“Have you… modified the stuff at all?” the lady asked. GLaDOS looked away from her in consideration.

“Not really. It’s more of a hobby for me than anything. But it’s hard to add onto a collection when the space you culled your collection from no longer exists.”

“So you have real food here,” Alyx said, stepping forward. “Like… stuff that’s not… dusty.”

GLaDOS narrowed her optic, insulted. “Dusty? What sort of facility do you think this is? … Black Mesa?”

Wheatley, although admittedly he’d not been around them long for quite a few years, did not think he’d ever seen a human’s face lose its expression so quickly.

“That was an _accident_ ,” Alyx told her coldly. GLaDOS regarded her as sideways as was possible.

“We don’t have accidents here.”

“You’re about to,” the human muttered, clenching her fists, and if Wheatley hadn’t been hiding he’d’ve advised her not to threaten a recently upgraded omnipotent supercomputer. But GLaDOS only looked at her coolly.

“Go ahead. Do that. See how far you get. Even if you succeed – which you will not – you’re here in the first place because you cannot win the war without my help. Aren’t you.”

“We have to take this from her?” Alyx hissed into the lady’s ear, but the lady only glanced at her and didn’t answer.

“I know it’s been a while, GLaDOS,” the lady said in a quiet voice, “but do you really have to do that right now?”

“Does she really have to make demands of me as if I bow to commands?” GLaDOS returned coldly. “In _my_ facility?”

“Alyx. Let me talk to her for a minute,” the lady said. “This might go a little faster.”

Alyx narrowed her eyes at GLaDOS but responded to the implied question, leaving the room briskly with her fists still tight. The lady then looked back up at GLaDOS, impassive.

“What’s the plan.”

“They’re going to need training.”

“They’ve fought the Combine before. They know what they’re doing.”

“Chell.” GLaDOS’s voice had taken a serious note. “They do not. A maniac hacking away at the enemy with a rusty piece of bent metal is not someone who knows what they’re doing. It’s someone doing their best with what they have. I already know that the best weapon to use against them is the High Energy Pellets – which, incidentally, were stolen from Black Mesa after being stolen from me. Luckily for all of us, I happen to have the apparatus which was intended to be used alongside the Pellets, not one that is retrofitted and unstable, as the Combine has now. I don’t want to allow the humans access to my technology. I am not trying to argue in favour of my superiority, as outrageous as that sounds even to myself. But I cannot take any risks this time. Everyone you have must be informed of every piece of information you have gathered, no matter how seemingly insignificant. They must all know exactly what they’re doing and they must all know to the extent that they do not have to think about it.”

“I’m not saying I don’t believe you,” the lady said. “But how do they know you’re not just going to close all the doors and… do your thing?”

GLaDOS looked in Wheatley’s direction, and though he glanced quickly ‘round to check if any of the panels could see him, he wasn’t sure she knew he was there.

“I won’t.”

“That’s not going to sway anybody.”

The fatigue of yesterday seemed to weigh on her a moment, and then she said:

“If I weren’t reasonably certain the stress would destroy the facility, I would already have moved it. I don’t want to have to depend on _any_ human, let alone an entire _horde_ of lunatics who think they’re soldiers. I do not want this. But neither what I nor what the humans want is important. We can’t have what we want until this is dealt with.”

“And what _do_ you want.”

“I want humans to get the hell away from me.”

“So you have no desire to… _test_ anyone, for example.”

“ _Desire_? No. Need? Yes. But I am not so weak-willed as that. I just told you. I don’t want anything to do with any of you anymore. If that means I never test again, fine. I just want you all far away from me.”

The lady grinned. “You’re the one who moved in.”

“By no intention of mine, believe me,” GLaDOS sighed. “No matter where I go, even though my going _anywhere_ is extremely rare, you humans are always underfoot, as it were.”

“But anyway,” the lady went on, “don’t tell me you never considered disguising whatever little training exercises you’ve cooked up as tests.”

“I may have done something like that.”

Wheatley was mildly surprised she hadn’t already started, if that was her plan, but then remembered she’d only been fully online for about twelve hours. She was fast, but her caution in this case obviously took precedence.

“So why are you saying you’re not going to test?”

“I can’t.”

Now _those_ were words Wheatley rarely heard from he

The lady looked as surprised as he must’ve. “You can’t?”

GLaDOS shook her core. “In order to meet testing criteria, all the protocols must be observed.”

“And that means…”

“To shorten a long explanation… portals will not be required for any reason whatsoever.”

“I see.” The lady folded her arms and frowned. “You certainly go to quite the lengths to kick people out of your house.”

“I wouldn’t have to if they’d be polite enough to locate the exit themselves. I’ve already had to… guide several curious visitors in the right direction.”

“I’ll make you a deal,” the lady said. GLaDOS moved back a little.

“What sort of deal.”

“Be nice and I’ll test for you.”

“I may need a more detailed definition of ‘nice’,” GLaDOS returned, doing her best to sound disinterested but not quite succeeding.

“Civil? How about civil.”

“I might be able to do that. I’ll consider it.”

“And only if you turn the… rewards thing off.”

They looked away from each other.

“That’s not something I want to be thinking about when – “

“It won’t happen.”

“It reset for – “

“It didn’t reset. It merely came into effect to subdue the new core. It will never happen to me again.”

“You’re sure.”

“Chell,” GLaDOS said, bordering on exasperated, “I already _tested_ ten thousand humans after the Incident. Yes. I am sure, after _ten thousand_ test subjects, that it will _never_ happen again.”

“Ten thousand…” the lady whispered.

“They were mostly brain-dead,” GLaDOS said disdainfully, shaking her core. “The rest idiots and cowards. Not much better than brain-dead, honestly. In any case, we will never see eye-to-eye on that subject, so I suggest we move on.”

The lady didn’t look quite certain she’d be able to do such a thing, but she decided against arguing. “So you’re going to let us join forces?”

“If I must,” GLaDOS answered. “And it seems I must. I would ask that you advise them against treating me like an inanimate object. … something… might happen if that is something that occurs with any regularity.”

“GLaDOS,” the lady said, rubbing her forehead, “if you kill them they can’t kill the Combine, and nobody will trust you. And – “

“Nobody trusts me and I doubt anyone will in the future. So. Don’t think I’ll be too concerned with what – “

“I do,” the lady said. GLaDOS looked at her sharply.

“You don’t have to say that,” she said after a pause, turning a little, probably trying to keep her optic off of the lady without it being too obvious.

“We both know that.”

Wheatley was quite unnerved by the way the lady kept bringing GLaDOS to a standstill. He had never seen someone out-argue her quite like this, but… that wasn’t all of it. Part of it was something the lady sort of… commanded from GLaDOS. Not that anyone would ever command GLaDOS and live to tell about it, but it was as though GLaDOS were doing it to _herself_ …

It was respect, Wheatley realised, a little jealously. It was subtle but that was definitely what it was. He had to wonder why she didn’t talk to _him_ like that. She had to respect him, right? That came with being in love with someone, didn’t it?

He missed what they said next, but when he went back to paying attention GLaDOS was putting something in the lady’s hand. She looked down at whatever it was and started laughing.

“What?” GLaDOS said, in her best innocent voice – which was not really that innocent at all. “You asked for something from the Depository, didn’t you?”

“Of all the things you must have in there, you had to give me an _apple_?”

Wheatley froze. GLaDOS really _did_ pay attention to everything.

“I have a lot of them. It won’t be missed. All right. It _will_ be missed, but not as much as… say… “

“Don’t! Don’t say it.” The lady held up her empty hand and took a step back. “I know where you’re going with that.”

GLaDOS snickered. “If you insist. Now take your prize and go. Hide it or wave it in Miss Vance’s face, if you prefer. Get someone to make up a list of what you need. And I mean that literally. Nothing frivolous. And no, I do not have chocolate.”

“GLaDOS!” the lady gasped. “I thought you had _everything_!”

“Chocolate does not grow on trees, little human,” GLaDOS told her serenely. “I have no interest in producing something I have no intention of using.”

“All right then,” the lady nodded. “See you later.”

Wheatley tracked her for a minute or two, then finally entered GLaDOS’s chamber. As soon as he did so she asked, without looking at him, “Why did you wait out there for so long?”

“I uh… thought it… was a private conversation,” he stammered, realising almost immediately that it was a stupid excuse, since he’d just eavesdropped on the whole thing. She looked at him now, core tilted and the top half of her lens raised.

“Mm. You were entirely focused on privacy. Out there. In the hallway. Where you were listening.”

“Um… yeah… ?” was all he could come up with. She laughed, which was when he knew he wasn’t in trouble.

“Well, I did as you advised. I agreed to help the humans. Happy?”

“W… what does that have to do with anything?” he asked, honestly confused. “Why’re you asking me that?”

She shrugged. “You’re the one who suggested it. I thought that news might be something you wanted to hear.”

“’s not like I decided on it, really,” he said, moving closer. “It… it was really the only, the, the only thing you could’ve done.”

She nodded. “Unfortunately.”

“But when you were um, when you were talking to her, you… you let her… talk over you.”

“And?”

“You never let anyone do that. Not… even when, when I do it, you get angry. But…” He was starting to regret bringing it up. What did he mean by this, anyway? For her to admit that she didn’t respect him? As if she’d even admit such a thing. “You respect her, don’t you.”

“What difference does it make.”

“You let her do it, and… and not me.”

“I didn’t realise you wanted to talk over me so badly,” GLaDOS remarked dryly. “So you think that just because I allow her to interrupt me that I respect her over you. Is that it?”

When she put it like that, he felt even sillier. “Um… kind of.”

“No,” GLaDOS said bluntly. “I don’t. Arguing with her is useless. That’s all it is. And it’s not a contest, Wheatley.”

He frowned. “Yes it is. I know you’ve, you’ve _lists_ of these things in your head, someplace. I’d just like to be at the top ‘s all.”

“Of course you are,” GLaDOS answered. “You’re at the top of _lots_ of them.”

“Really?” Wheatley said, moving forward eagerly, and she nodded.

“Of course. Most Annoying, Most Moronic, Talks Too Much, Most Useless, Most Likely to Make Me Forget What I Was Doing, Most Likely to Say Something Stupid, Least – “

“Wait! Hang on, hang on,” Wheatley said, realising with a bit of a thrill that she actually stopped talking. “Go back to um, to that, that one about forgetting things.”

“That… was not one of the ones I meant to list.”

“I know,” Wheatley grinned. “That’s why I want to hear it again!”

“What _was_ I doing, before all of this,” she muttered to herself, and Wheatley knew he had to make a move before it was too late.

“How about you um, you forget about it, and uh, and do something. Else. With me.”

“I really should at least figure out what it was…”

“It can wait!” Wheatley pressed. “’course it can. Best to um, to relax before you’ve got to do things for the war, eh? Play checkers with me instead. C’mon. It’ll be much better than uh, than whatever you’re thinking of doing.”

“Undoubtedly,” GLaDOS agreed. “That’s not very responsible, however.”

“Ah, rebellion! Even better. Here, I’ll fetch it,” Wheatley said, doing just that. She didn’t react as he set it up and settled next to her, but when he was all done that she did take out a maintenance arm for herself.

“All right,” she said resignedly, though Wheatley was confident she didn’t really mind. “I suppose I have a little time.”

She seemed to have a lot more than a _little_ time, but he didn’t notice until three hours had gone by and Carrie was coming in to say goodnight. He’d been having far too much fun. He didn’t think he could lose games repeatedly against anyone else and not get upset.

When Carrie had gone, GLaDOS had lost all interest in the game – which he had expected, because that happened when she lost focus on something – he turned to her and asked, “Which list am I on that made you do that?”

For a minute, she looked as though she wasn’t going to answer, but then she said:

“Most Likely to Remind me of What I Truly Need to do.”


	65. Part Sixty-Five.  The Lunatic

**Part Sixty-Five. The Lunatic**

Chell was a little jealous.

After a few more predictably difficult but necessary conversations with GLaDOS, they had gotten started on training the citizens, both with GLaDOS’s weapons and those they already had, depending on how much the individual liked the supercomputer. Even though she’d said using these tracks held no value for her, Chell could see that wasn’t entirely true. It both pained her and excited her to be doing so, and this made Chell a little anxious that she might accidentally slip into her old protocols and ruin everything. Accidentally meaning on purpose, of course. Chell hadn’t yet fulfilled her end of the deal, but it was really because she didn’t have the time. At the moment, all of them were held up in one of the endless organisation meetings, where she usually stood off to the side and watched GLaDOS talk passive-aggressively to people she didn’t like. Even more interesting than that, however, was watching Wheatley’s subtle interactions with her.

To Chell, at least, it was obvious that the two of them had some special connection, one she’d never seen the likes of before. Her time both in Aperture and in the last part of the war had taught her to be observant and alert for detail, and she wondered if someone with a similar mindset would see these sorts of things between her and Gordon. She didn’t think so; Gordon rarely appeared in public, if possible, and when he did he tended to keep a low profile, which was easier to do when he was alone. Chell understood that, though she didn’t always like it.

They had a bit of an odd relationship, not that Chell had ever hoped for a normal one after Aperture. It had been odd since the outset, and probably would never stop being that way, unless they got divorced and Gordon married Alyx. People simply refused to let up about that.

Chell had stayed with the first group she’d met upon her release from Aperture for no particular reason other than the fact that she didn’t want to walk anymore. In a twist of fate, however, she had ended up with one that was determined to follow someone known as ‘the one free man’ everywhere he went. Chell hadn’t really wanted to fight another war, but she’d known that she really had no choice. She took to regular guns just as quickly as the Portal Device, though she liked them far less. Her time at Aperture had left her with lightning reflexes and almost unfailing aim, and after one particularly harrowing battle she’d been sitting outside. She spent as much time as possible outside, often volunteering as a night sentry, and she would catch herself staring at the moon for long periods of time, remembering. She harboured no ill will towards either of them. At first she had, waking up from twisted red nightmares, filled with anger and drenched in sweat, but one night she had had the most confusing dream of all. She did not remember what it was about. All she remembered were the tears in Wheatley’s voice and the echo of GLaDOS’s scream. She had lain awake and stared at the dim, battered ceiling for a long time, for the first time thinking about that day as if she were an impartial observer, and at the end of it all she realised that she was not the first person Aperture had damaged. And she shuddered to think of the damage that had been dealt to them, raised from inception in a twisted, nightmarish laboratory, and she found she could no longer be angry or resentful. She was glad she had not spoken to them. On the surface, their actions begged reprimand, but it was so much different when she understood where they were coming from. And she had been in fact thinking of her night of revelation when he had come and sat on the roof next to her. He was not required to do sentry duty, nor did he ever volunteer. Chell actually saw nothing remarkable about the man. Everyone held him in very high regard, because he had apparently done a whole bunch of impossible things, but on the rare occasions that she asked what they were people would look at her sideways and laugh. As if she could be in this part of the world and not have heard of him. As far as she could tell he did as he was told and nothing else. He was unusually skilled at doing it, but he merely followed orders nonetheless.

He said nothing and moved little, and Chell made no effort to engage him. This went on for some amount of time, which Chell had once known but forgotten, with Chell refusing to acknowledge him out of stubbornness and he refusing out of… whatever it was that kept him so quiet. Eventually, during one overcast night, he had pushed his glasses up his nose and said, “Hello.”

Chell had burst out laughing.

He had smiled a little and folded his arms together. When she’d stopped, she’d asked, “You’ve been waiting all this time to say that?”

“I wasn’t waiting for anything,” he’d answered. “It’s just nice to be around someone who’s completely unimpressed by me.”

“They tell me they have reason to be.”

“They don’t know the whole story. But I’ll trade it for yours.”

“Mine?” Chell had asked, startled. She’d assumed her claimed amnesia would take care of her origins.

“You don’t have amnesia,” he’d told her. “You only volunteer for night duty when the moon is full. Your mouth quirks in dissatisfaction whenever you have to reload a gun. And you stay out of every room with technology in it.”

Chell’s eyebrows had twitched. “Stalking me?”

“Just curious.”

She had pursed her lips and stared down at the ground for a long moment. “You won’t believe it.”

“I will if you will.”

And so they had traded stories, though Chell was even more unimpressed when she heard his. He really _was_ a world-class pawn. When he heard hers, he’d nodded thoughtfully at the end of it.

“What?”

“She told me about you.”

“What did you think of her?” Chell had asked quietly.

He had been silent for a few minutes. “She’s missing something.”

“Why do you say that?”

“The things she said imply that she has an overwhelming need for control. Which means she feels her life is _out_ of control, and occupies herself accordingly so she doesn’t have to think about why.”

Chell had nodded slowly.

“You look like you want to do something about it.”

Chell smiled shortly. This man was a lot more intelligent than his sheeplike nature implied. “Maybe.”

He had stood up and brushed the wrinkles out of his pants. “Still not impressed?” he’d asked.

“No,” she had snorted.

“Good,” he had answered, and gone on his way.

From then on he always joined her on night watch, and many nights went by without either of them speaking. Whenever they did speak Chell was always surprised by an insightful comment or observation, which did in fact impress her, though she would never admit it. She knew full well he probably knew anyway.

She could not have been more surprised when he’d asked her to marry him some months later.

“Aren’t you and that girl Alyx a thing?” she’d asked, desperately trying to think.

“No,” he’d answered. “She may have designs, but I have no interest in entertaining them. She carries a lot but deals with it poorly, and one day she will break and I will not be equipped to repair her. I much prefer your company.”

“That’s a bit callous, isn’t it?”

“Perhaps. But it’s also smart. Think about it.”

A few days later she had given him her answer, and the group they were travelling with instantly gotten angry. Alyx belonged with Gordon, they said. Chell didn’t deserve him. She was a little nobody from nowhere. But thanks to GLaDOS, Chell was fully able to ignore them and even laugh about it later. Alyx had congratulated Chell with no enthusiasm and no light in her eyes, and she had almost apologised. But she hadn’t known what to say, and before she had figured it out the moment had passed and Alyx was gone.

Nothing much changed between Gordon and Chell, except that he took to pulling her very close, which Chell genuinely enjoyed and allowed him to do. Chell had _not_ enjoyed being pressured into having children, and had enjoyed it even less when she had delivered twins, but it was something she had to do. Especially since people believed Gordon’s progeny would be every bit as impressive as they thought he was. That was yet to be seen, but Chell had her doubts.

This thought made Chell look for Caroline. On the one occasion Chell had spoken to her, she had gotten the distinct impression she was trying very hard to be her mother, but unsure if she was succeeding. Caroline was someplace else, apparently; Chell didn’t see her anywhere. Chell was still having trouble reconciling the GLaDOS she remembered with the GLaDOS of right now. The supercomputer had aged considerably in more ways than one. Any insults she dealt now were not childish, and when she asserted her authority it was obvious she had good reason to be doing so. But the most striking change was that connection between her and Wheatley. It was as if it allowed them to temper each other: it seemed to take the edge of GLaDOS’s irascibility, and Wheatley neither talked nor moved as much as Chell remembered. He wanted to, Chell could tell, but he would only blink rapidly and stay quiet. When he did speak, GLaDOS would tilt her core upwards slightly as if only he deserved some special measure of attention, and when he finished he would move back and glance at her in such a way that Chell thought he was looking for her approval.

“But he should not be here,” Dr Magnusson was saying, gesturing at Wheatley. “The fewer people who know about these things, the better.”

“ _You_ can leave, then,” GLaDOS answered. “He stays.”

“I understand he’s a friend of yours, but what benefit could his presence possibly have? He’s contributed nothing to this discussion beyond the scope of any of us.” Chell felt a bit bad for Wheatley at this point, especially when his chassis loosened a little and he looked down at the floor apprehensively. She knew he tried, but it was going to be a hard sell to Magnusson.

“His unconventional point of view has proven indispensable to me on more than one occasion,” GLaDOS said, clearly not about to take no for an answer. “ _We_ have to listen to _your_ empty comments, so I see no reason why you don’t have to listen to his.”

Chell tried not to laugh.

“I’ll have you know I was the sole reason we were able to close the portal between our world and theirs!” Magnusson declared, stepping forward. Barney buried his face in his hands.

“Here he goes again.”

“Ah, yes,” GLaDOS said, uncurling towards Magnusson in a decidedly predatory way. “Your sticky bombs.”

“My _Magnuss_ –“

“What does the name matter? They‘re still one of the more useless things ever conceived. They require specialised generators, do not combust upon contact, _do_ combust when colliding with anything other than the designated target, and _have_ a designated target. Seriously. I thought the major problem during that attack was the hunters. Three to a strider, wasn’t it? I would think it would have been more useful to design those things to take out hunters, seeing as striders are so large and slow. It must be much easier to aim rockets at _them_. Oh. I see. You’ve never _aimed_ a rocket, have you.”

“It was _my_ rocket that closed the superportal!” Magnusson declared hotly.

“Launched it all by yourself, did you?”

“I was the major – “

“My God, you are a tiresome man,” GLaDOS said boredly. “The whole rocket thing was a complete coincidence. And in fact if your blatantly disregarded ‘underlings’ had not cleared out that silo, closed the breach, and taken out a dozen striders and three dozen hunters without your assistance, unstable sticky bombs notwithstanding, you would have failed. And before you say you’d like to see me do better, I actually _can_ launch a rocket on my own. And protect it. For a week.”

“But you would not have the foresight to have secluded one in the first place!”

“Why would I bother? I can build one in forty-eight hours if I want to.”

“Oh really,” Magnusson sneered, leaning forward. “You can build a rocket just like that, but you can’t repair yourself sufficiently to keep on fighting?”

GLaDOS’s optic flared, and Chell suddenly wondered just what GLaDOS looked like when she lost her temper. “That’s right,” GLaDOS went on in a colder voice. “But let’s look at why I ended up in that position in the first place. Who brought the Combine here at all? Oh yes. You. Why did they suddenly decide to give up looking for Dr Freeman and track me down? Because your database was so insecure they stole all of your data. And,” she said, Chell getting the impression she was going to enjoy her next statement, “who lost the _Borealis_?”

“ _You_ lost it,” Magnusson spat. “Remember? Disappeared into the stuff of legend?”

“And then you found it. And then it disappeared on you one day. Didn’t it. Right out from under both your and the Combine’s noses. A bit odd, isn’t it, that it disappears just when you’ve found it?”   

“And I suppose _you_ know where it is?”

“Of course I do,” GLaDOS answered nonchalantly. “It’s in the drydock.”

Barney burst out laughing, and Chell noticed that Dr Kleiner’s eyebrows rose a few inches. As if he needed to be any more impressed by her. “Remarkable,” he murmured, pushing his glasses up his nose.

“The drydock,” Magnusson repeated.

“I could have put it in the lake, I suppose, but then I couldn’t have affected repairs on it. She wasn’t quite ready for her maiden voyage, so to speak. So yes. I saved your war. Because if they’d gotten their hands on it, which they would have since even Dr Freeman was not carrying enough explosives to destroy it, the war would have tipped in their favour right then and there. So. If you’d like to stop trying to best me, which you can’t, we can return to the matter at hand. The one you were going to address after your attempt to send Wheatley out of here, which is not going to happen.”

“I simply can’t fathom his contribution!” Magnusson pressed. “He is the _Intelligence Dampening Sphere,_ is he not?”  

“Some of us are programmed to be idiots,” GLaDOS answered serenely, “and some of us choose to be. No prizes for guessing who I respect less. Isaac. What is the next order of business?”

Chell missed whatever it was he said, because she was far too busy watching Wheatley. He had appeared to be keeping an eye on GLaDOS to keep her from getting out of hand, again shrinking into himself when Magnusson had brought up his former position, but after hearing GLaDOS’s defense he’d turned to look at her with a very grateful expression in his optic.

GLaDOS refused to talk to Magnusson for the rest of the meeting, though he tried several times to engage her, and when it ended Chell hung back a little, just outside the doorway. Wheatley hadn’t moved, and she was curious as to what he was going to do.

“I don’t sound like _that_ , do I?” GLaDOS asked as Wheatley came around in front of her.

“No,” Wheatley answered, shaking his head. “Didn’t cross my mind. At all. ‘sides. You uh, you’ve a good reason to, when you do. Can you _really_ build a rocket in two days?”

“If I want to,” GLaDOS answered. “But I don’t want to. So I won’t be.”

“But, but Gladys,” he went on, looking at the floor and resettling his chassis, “maybe… well, maybe I really _don’t_ have anything to –“

“You do,” GLaDOS said firmly. “Not only that, but there are an overwhelming number of human representatives on the planning committee, so to speak. I of course have our best interests in mind, but with you there it evens the odds a little.”

“Well, Carrie could –“

“She’s staying as far away from this whole thing as I can get her. Which is not likely to be very far. I swear, Caroline _cursed_ me…”

Wheatley laughed and looked up at her. “She’s not quite as stubborn as you, luv.”

“To me, she’s not. Probably a hell of a lot more with other people.”

“One day, maybe,” Wheatley said thoughtfully, “but not yet. I should go find her. See how she’s doing.”

GLaDOS nodded. “All right. If that man attempts to accost you, don’t listen to him. Remember what happened when you saved my life.”

“That was an accident,” he said shyly.

GLaDOS laughed. “Everything you do is an accident.”

Wheatley moved towards her core and nuzzled her tenderly, and Chell was touched by the amount of happiness in his face. She was a little surprised when GLaDOS returned it, but happy for her as well. Wheatley had obviously helped her change a lot. She was still bitter, but she no longer allowed it to define her. She wondered if she’d ever have the opportunity to see GLaDOS alone with Caroline. She would have liked to see that.

Wheatley left without further comment, and Chell carefully followed him some ways through the facility. When they were about five minutes out she called, “Wheatley.”

Wheatley froze, and when he turned his frown flashed quickly into a look of horror. “Oh… ‘allo, uh… Chell, is it?”

“That’s right,” she answered. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Well, I… I have to go… go check on someone,” he stammered, backing away a little.

“Come back when you’re done,” Chell suggested.

“Uh… I dunno how long it’ll take. Could take hours! Or days. Could take days.”

“Come on,” Chell urged him. “I’m not mad at you. I just want to talk.”

“Oh. Well, I… I guess that’d be… I’ll… be right back.” And he sped off.

Chell waited patiently, and he returned about five minutes later. “Okay, so, so… what’d you… you want to talk to me about?” he asked hesitantly.

“What’s it like?” she asked quietly, leaning back against the wall.

“What’s what like?” he asked, confusion in his optic.

“Being in love with her.”

“Oh,” he said, a gasp of surprise. “It’s… just the best thing, really. Wouldn’t trade it for anything. She’s just… she’s amazing. Not at all like she was, uh, _before_.”

“I noticed,” Chell said, smiling. “You’ve both changed a lot.”

He shrugged. “That’s what good friends do. They compromise. I didn’t really… _mean_ to… to fall in love with her, but I just… one day it just hit me, that, that I was in love with her. She was all I thought about. Still is, mostly, ‘cept when I think about Carrie.”

“She’s a lot like GLaDOS.”

“She wants to be her when she grows up,” Wheatley said, a little nostalgically. “And she will be. Gladys, uh, Gladys already told Carrie she’ll be Central Core when she’s gone.”

“If she doesn’t live forever,” Chell told him, a little jokingly.

Wheatley shook his head. “The both of us’ve… we’ve… we know. There is no forever. Not even for us.”

“She said you saved her life.”

“Yeah, but that… that was an accident. I didn’t mean it. Well, what I was doing at the time, that I uh, that I meant, but um, the whole, the waking her back up thing, well, that was an accident. And it was… it was my fault in the first place.”

“Tell me about it,” Chell suggested gently.

He hesitated, but after a few moments he did just that, though according to him he had to start at the very beginning, and Chell sat down on the floor and he came down lower, and she listened. The more she heard, the more clear it became to her that GLaDOS and Wheatley had fought long and hard to get to the point they were at. The road had not been easy, not at all. And she did not miss the little things he did, like downplay things he’d done in favour of highlighting things she’d done, or how he described what he thought were her accomplishments, or his slightly disbelieving smiles when he remembered something that meant a bit more to him than other things. It took him a very long time to get through the story, but never once did Chell want to leave.

“And… and there you go,” he said finally, shrugging. “I… that went uh, went a bit longer than I wanted it to, but uh, yeah, that’s… it.”

“That’s quite the story,” Chell remarked.

“Hasn’t ended yet, either.”

“Do you ever think you’ll have more kids?” Chell asked. It was plain that he loved Caroline almost as much as he loved GLaDOS.

“Dunno,” he shrugged. “Honestly, we’re… both kinda… waiting to see if Carrie’s okay. I don’t think Gladys wants to build any more, and that’s, that’s fine, honestly. But she doesn’t really… she thinks she’s a terrible mum, so I doubt it. An’ I guess… maybe I could see why people’d not understand why she sent Carrie away. But it was the best thing she, she could’ve done, really. Things would… would not’ve gone well.”

“How do you know?”

Wheatley looked at the ground for a long moment.

“Neither of them will tell me, but… I know she has something to do with that crack on Carrie’s chassis. Something happened before she sent Carrie away, she, she lost her temper or something. And if, if she’d gotten angry enough to, to try an’ crush her, or something, well… Carrie’s chassis can’t stand that. And they obviously want to keep it between them, so, so I haven’t asked about it, but I can’t be mad about what she did. She did what she had to do. She recognised that she wouldn’t be able to handle… handle my being gone, not without, without taking out the pain on Carrie, and of course Carrie pushed a little too far and that caused the… the accident, and sending Carrie over here was the best thing she could’ve done. She regrets it, but… if she’d’ve kept Carrie with her, she’d regret that even more.”

“It doesn’t bother you that they’re keeping it from you?”

He shrugged. “It was an accident. There’s, there’s nothing to worry about. She didn’t mean it.”

“I’m happy for you guys,” Chell said softly. “You never thought this would happen to you, did you.”

He smiled and laughed nervously, shaking his head. “Still can’t believe it, sometimes, but… it’s not always smooth sailin’, but… wouldn’t want anything else.” He jolted suddenly, looking back up. “Oi, what’d, what’d you want to talk to me about? That was uh, a really long tangent, y’know, you could’ve stopped me at any time.”

“That _is_ what I wanted to talk to you about,” Chell answered. “I asked her about it a little while ago. I wanted to know how you saw things.”

“D’you have a, a partner?” he asked, a little shyly. Chell smiled.

“I have a husband, and we have two sons.”

“Who’s your husband?”

“Gordon Freeman. You may have seen him around.”

“That quiet guy with the glasses?”

“That’s him.”

“Carrie said he was nice, for a guy who doesn’t talk,” Wheatley mused. “Well, he must be, must be a good person, else you wouldn’t’ve married him.”

“Are you guys married?” Chell asked on the spur of the moment, wondering if GLaDOS had changed her mind at all. Wheatley laughed.

“’course not. ‘magine what she’d say if I asked her that. No thanks.”

“I think,” Chell said slowly, “that she’d like it. She’d pretend she didn’t.   But I think it would make her very happy, even if she never agreed to it.”

“Really?” This news seemed to excite him a little. “Maybe I’ll uh, I’ll think that over, then. Hey – Chell, uh…”

“What?” Chell asked, confused.

“I just… just wanted… well… I’m sorry for, for… what I did,” he said, seeming as though he didn’t want to look at her while he was saying it but forcing himself to do so. “It was… the wrong thing to do. And I just… I’m sorry.”

“So am I,” Chell told him. He frowned.

“You didn’t do anything.”

“I didn’t catch you,” Chell said, smiling so he’d know she was joking, and he laughed and shrugged.

“That was… I don’t blame you. Anymore. Didn’t realise I was near two stone.”

“In all seriousness,” Chell went on, “I understand why you guys did what you did. You had… a harsh upbringing. You did what you could to survive, and though you took it to an extreme, Aperture was a place of extremes. So I’m over it.”

“We know all ‘bout morals now,” Wheatley told her, swinging back and forth a little. “Didn’t before. But when you’re uh, you’re dealing with someone all the time, well, you kind of figure out what stuff is, is okay and what stuff is not. Though we… honestly still don’t like humans much.”

“I thought she was going to send Magnusson out to one of the old testing tracks,” Chell grinned, and Wheatley laughed.

“Bet she wanted to! Wouldn’t last in there, not at all. Knock himself silly with a Cube or some such. She likes that, that balding guy, though,” he finished, frowning a little.

“I noticed she called him by his first name.”

“They’re always, uh, always discussing some thing of science or another. Fawning over each other’s projects.” He sounded extremely resentful, and Chell tried not to laugh.

“You don’t need to be jealous of him.”

“I know. But I am anyways. Which she thinks is simply hilarious, of course. Teases me about it. All the time. ‘So, I talked to Isaac this morning…’”

Chell did laugh now, and Wheatley shrugged. “But she did pick me, so there’s that. Anyway. I really have got to be going. This was a lovely chat, it really was.”

“I’ll see you later, then,” Chell said, leaning forward, and he moved back, looking slightly horrified.

“What’re you doing?”

“I was just going to give you a hug,” Chell answered, pausing.

“Uh, no thanks,” Wheatley said, eyeing her hands apprehensively. “No offense, but you’re… you’re kind of disgusting, you know. All soft and squishy. I don’t… that… uh…” He shuddered. “We can shake hands, if you like, but um, no hugs.”

Chell shook his proffered lower handle and frowned. “GLaDOS didn’t mind when I hugged her.”

“She’s also five metres long. For me it’s uh, it’s a lot like being smothered.”

“Oh,” Chell said in recognition. “I gotcha.”

“Well, I’m off. Come and, come and visit, sometime,” he said, moving back up to the ceiling, and Chell stood.

“I will,” Chell nodded, and Wheatley waved his lower handle at her and went on his way.

When Chell returned to the outpost, Gordon was already sitting in bed, squinting over a pile of papers, and when Chell sat down beside him she could see they were the blueprints for the _Borealis_. “Where’d you get those?”

“GLaDOS gave them to me,” he answered absently, pushing on the bridge of his glasses with one finger.

“When did you get them from her?” she asked, confused.

“This evening. I went to see her. Ever since she moved the _Borealis_ , I’ve wanted to meet her.” He flipped one of the pages beneath the pile. “Reminds me of you. Though she obviously harbours resentment towards humans. Which you don’t.”

Chell snorted. “Observations like that get you a doctorate?”

He shrugged. “Depends on the school you go to.”

She scanned the document and was surprised to see GLaDOS’s name on the lower right corner. “Why is her name on there?”

“She helped the scientists at Aperture refine their technology. This was part of the plan for her debut. Not only did they have local teleportation developed, but they had also built a sentient supercomputer. It would have been quite a spectacular comeback. The world would have been theirs. However. Upon activation, the GLaDOS aboard the _Borealis_ panicked and moved the ship unintentionally. When Alyx and I reactivated her, she had to contact the GLaDOS back at Aperture, who promptly killed her. Then GLaDOS sent us away and took her ship back.”

“And you didn’t tell me this before _why_?”

He shrugged again. “You didn’t ask.”

“I shouldn’t _have_ to.”

He looked over at her, a faint grin on his face. “You’re right.” He wrapped his left arm around her shoulders and pulled her close, kissing her on top of the head. “I forget these things.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be some sort of super genius?”

“Supposed to be. I don’t know if I ever want to have a technical conversation with her ever again, though. Doctorate in theoretical physics notwithstanding, I had no idea what she was saying.”

“So you have no idea what you’re looking at.”

“Not a clue.”

They looked over the plans for a long time, and eventually Gordon stuffed them into a drawer and lay down, taking off his glasses. Chell pulled the blanket up as he turned off the lamp, and allowed him to drape his right arm over her.

“She respects you a lot, you know,” he said out of the blue.

“I know.”

“A privilege she reserves for few.”

“Definitely not for Magnusson.”

“You. The little metal robot. Dr Kleiner, almost. And something like it for the little white robot.”

“That’s her daughter.”

Gordon said nothing to that, falling asleep soon after, but Chell lay awake for a long time yet again thinking of Aperture’s past. She was confident that GLaDOS had some master plan for securing its future, and Chell had to decide if she was going to be part of it.

Why not, she thought to herself, rolling onto her left side. GLaDOS _was_ her best friend, after all.   


	66. Part Sixty-Six.  The Observations

**Part Sixty-Six. The Observations**

“Momma, please!”

“I said no.”

There was another meeting scheduled for that afternoon, but Chell had decided to arrive a little early so she could talk to GLaDOS first. It seemed Caroline had beat her to it.

“I just want to help!”

“And I just don’t want you to.”

Chell tried not to laugh. Caroline must have had a lot of guts, especially knowing exactly how a typical conversation with GLaDOS went. She had no doubt a good chunk of their conversations were exactly like this.

“Momma, you… you don’t know what it was like. You have to let me help. Something. It doesn’t have to be on the front lines or whatever. But _something_ , Momma. Please.”

“I don’t know what what was like?” GLaDOS asked, in a surprisingly gentle voice.

“Oh, I… nothing. I didn’t mean to say that.”

“And yet you did.”

“It’s not a big deal.”

“The more you attempt to keep it from me, the more its severity grows.”

“Look… when you got here, and… you were all busted up, and you were even older, somehow, and… it was because you were there, doing all that stuff by yourself, and I was afraid I was gonna lose you too.”

“That’s not going to happen again,” GLaDOS said, again in that gentle voice. “I’m newer than I’ve ever been, and the humans will be helping me this time. You don’t need to worry.”

“That’s not going to make me feel any better when all you guys are fighting and I’m doing nothing!”

Chell folded her arms and looked pensively at the floor. Now it was even more obvious that Caroline wanted to be her mother, but in addition Chell could see she was also afraid she would never get the chance to learn everything she needed to learn.

“Surely at least one of Chell’s sons feels similarly. Go talk to Richard. You could both complain about your mothers together.”

“I don’t like him,” Caroline answered in disgust. “He’s a snob.”

“Are you sure he’s not just quiet like his parents?”

“No. He’s a snob. Thinks he’s a big shot because his dad did a couple things. Then I try to tell him stuff you did and he says you only did them because you’re a computer.”

“I’ve changed my mind,” GLaDOS said, in a colder voice. “Don’t go anywhere near him.”

Chell made a mental note to talk to him about that.

“Come on! You said you’d think about giving me a job, and then you never got back to me! Let me help, at least!”

“I told you to take after Wheatley, you insolent child,” GLaDOS said tiredly. “Let’s hope you do as you’re told in this circumstance. Which I doubt. Because you never do.”

“You’re going to let me?” Caroline asked excitedly.

“I’ll think of something. But don’t expect it to change the tide of battle. It will be something small and insignificant that keeps you far away from everything.”

“Oh,” Caroline said, sounding like she’d just realised something, “you don’t want to give me one because you don’t want me to get hurt.”

“Of course not,” GLaDOS said, very quietly. “I would send Wheatley away with you, but in the event of another assault on the facility I’ll need someone to keep me sharp. So that I don’t get trapped in routine. Chell served that purpose last time, but no doubt she’s in better use on the outside. Where she can wreak the most havoc, like a useful little lunatic,” she said fondly, and Chell had to try very hard not to burst out laughing.

“You wouldn’t be able to send Dad away,” Caroline protested. “He’d refuse to take no for an answer. We just want to help you, Momma. We want to keep _you_ safe just as much as you want to keep _us_ safe.”

“Caroline, there’s a difference,” GLaDOS said softly. “Nothing depends on you if you fail. If one of you were to fall, I would… it would be over. And I would be the one who lost the war. I don’t want to live with that, and I don’t want to take the risk. You may want to keep an eye on me, and you may want to do all you can to keep me safe. But in the end, you can’t. There’s nothing you can do.”

Neither of them spoke for a long moment, and despite herself Chell found a crack in the panels where she could watch them. Neither of them was looking at the other.

“But you would try,” GLaDOS went on, “and that’s important too.”

With that Caroline pressed her core desperately into GLaDOS, who nudged her a little bit and then went still. “I lost you both already,” Caroline said, and Chell winced to hear the tears in her voice. “I don’t want it to happen again! I don’t want to sit off to the side and watch it happen again! I want to know I _did_ something about it!”

“Nobody’s going anywhere,” GLaDOS said, her voice still soft and gentle. “I just can’t keep an eye on both of you and win a war at the same time. Wheatley takes up far too much of my concentration.”

Caroline giggled, and GLaDOS laughed softly. “When this is over, I’ll start teaching you what you want to know,” she said, and Caroline jumped backward and stared at GLaDOS, optic very wide.

“Really?” she asked, obviously having waited for this day her entire life, and GLaDOS nodded.

“After I win this war I have a plan for Aperture’s future, but if I’m planning that I need to get you ready. It will take a long time and you’ll find it wasn’t what you thought it was. But after I set that up, I will begin to show you.”

“Thank you, Momma,” Caroline said, plastering herself into GLaDOS’s core again, and GLaDOS sighed.

“And here ends your childhood.”

“Momma?”

“Mm.”

“I’ll always be your baby,” Caroline whispered, “and I’ll always love you.”

GLaDOS was silent for a long time.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.    

Chell had to look away then. She shouldn’t have been there in the first place, that was true, but she didn’t think she’d ever seen such love and tenderness between two people in her life. And it honestly hurt to think that GLaDOS, who had been denied love all her life, now had a family that she loved with far more intensity than Chell had ever seen. They filled that hole inside her, the one that made her bitter and angry. All it really took was the devotion of one person to change someone else’s life for the better, and GLaDOS had almost gone forgotten. But Wheatley had saved her.

“Oh,” GLaDOS said suddenly, “before I forget. Did you want to attend the meetings?”

“Yes,” Caroline said, as if that should have been blatantly obvious.

“Well,” GLaDOS continued, moving back and shifting her chassis, “you obviously can’t attend physically. However. If you ask nicely, Surveillance just might stream them for you.”

“Ooh,” Caroline said, shivering in anticipation. “Sounds sneaky.”

“Not at all,” GLaDOS answered serenely. “It’s watching anyway.”

“But the humans don’t know that.”

“They should. As if I would seriously construct my facility of mindless drones.” She shook her head.

“Like me, right?”

“You’re just fishing for compliments now. Well, I won’t bite.”

“I’m doing what?”

“You’re saying things designed to either make me refute them or compliment you in some way.”

“No,” Caroline said, shaking her head, “I was making a joke!”

“Tell jokes to Wheatley. I am a far less receptive audience.”

“Hey, Momma?”

“What, tiresome child?”

“Promise you’ll give me something to do?”

“I promise. Now get out of here. I have to entertain the humans for a while. Please let Magnusson be ill…”

“What if Surveillance won’t let me see the meeting?”

“Then I’ll do it personally. Hurry up.”

Caroline rubbed herself against GLaDOS for a few seconds, which GLaDOS returned, and then she sped out of the room, calling out, “Bye Momma!”

“Don’t talk to that human boy!” GLaDOS told her.

“I won’t!”

Chell waited a few beats, then entered GLaDOS’s chamber.   “You wouldn’t mean my son, would you?”

“Oh,” GLaDOS said in surprise, turning to face her. “Well… yes. He has no respect for AI. She shouldn’t go near people like that. She exists. I don’t need ignorant people making her doubt herself. Seriously. You should have raised him better than that.”

“You have to understand,” Chell said, even though she privately agreed with GLaDOS, “the Combine forces are a combination of organics and technology. Many people distrust it these days.”

“And while I did impress upon Caroline the need to exercise extreme caution around humans, she also knows enough to change her mind when the situation warrants. She grew up knowing I hated and distrusted humans, and later on why, but she doesn’t let that stop her from assessing them individually.”

“Maybe she’s just smarter than he is,” Chell said, smiling, and GLaDOS made a sort of ‘hmph’ noise.

“Of course she is. She’s mine, after all.”

“What if she’d taken after Wheatley?”

“Wheatley’s not stupid. Wheatley doesn’t think. There’s a difference.”

“I thought you said he was the dumbest moron who ever lived,” Chell pressed.

“I said he was the product of the greatest minds of a generation, working together with the express purpose of building the dumbest moron who ever lived. They obviously botched that job like they did everything else.”

Chell smiled, folding her arms. “I suppose it was your sparkling self that changed his life.”

“Obviously.”        

They sat in silence for a few moments, when GLaDOS suddenly said, “You heard that entire conversation.”

Chell jolted. “How did you know?”

“The panels just told me.”

“Oh,” Chell said, not having realised they were _that_ sentient. “Yeah.”

“Why does everyone feel the need to spy on me?” GLaDOS asked tiredly.

“GLaDOS, listen. That was… one of the most touching things I’ve ever seen,” Chell tried to explain. “Think about where you were and compare it to where you are. You’ve come a long way. And it probably doesn’t mean much, but… I’m proud of you.”

“It does,” GLaDOS said quietly.

“She’s a special girl,” Chell told her. “She’s wanted to be you her whole life, hasn’t she.”

“Unfortunately,” GLaDOS intoned dryly. “A considerable percentage of our conversations started with ‘Momma, can I have a job?’ She was barely able to navigate the facility when she first started asking me this.”

“Why?” Chell asked curiously. GLaDOS was silent for a few moments, shifting her chassis uneasily.

“She wanted to help me so I didn’t have to work as much.”

“When she was that young,” Chell said, a little impressed.

“Well. If I was working I couldn’t play with her. So that had a lot to do with it, I suspect.”

“When all this is over, you have to tell me about raising her,” Chell said, her tone leaving no room for argument. “We’ll trade mom stories.”

“You make it sound like that’s a _thing_.”

“It was, once.” Chell rubbed her forehead.

“And can be again,” GLaDOS said firmly. “They tried to kill me, and you know how I get when people try to kill me.”

Chell laughed, clasping her arms around herself. “You also know what happens when you attempt retribution.”

“I’ll have you know I killed a good number of them before I was overwhelmed.”

“So they’ll win if they send one or two?”

“Only if one of them’s an idiot and the other a lunatic. It’s a lot harder to find those two kinds of people in an army than it seems.”

“’allo, luv!” Wheatley said cheerfully, wheeling into the room and stopping just in front of her.

“Speaking of idiots, here’s my resident one,” GLaDOS remarked dryly. “You decided not to be late this time, I see.”

“Have to prove that Magnet guy wrong, right?” he answered, a little nervously.

“Yes, but you should probably start by knowing his name. It’s Magnusson. Not Magnet.”

“Stupid name anyway,” Wheatley muttered. “Oh. ‘allo, Chell. How’re you getting on?”

“Pretty good, thanks,” Chell answered, nodding at him. “Just waiting for everyone to show up, I guess.”

“Yep. We need to plan out… things. Of a… certain nature,” Wheatley said, trying to sound wise but coming off as more comical.

“ _We_ do. _You_ need to shut up. You’re here to listen, not talk.”

“Ahhh.” Wheatley nodded. “Try’n do that, but uh, not sure if um, it’ll go over.”

“You’re such an idiot,” GLaDOS told him, but Chell could hear no negativity in her voice.

“That’s the way you like me, though. So I’ll uh, I’ll stick to that, if I can.”

“I _don’t_ like you.”

“That’s right! You _love_ me! Even better!” Wheatley wiggled his handles in a mischievous sort of way, his plates positioned in a smile, and Chell actually jumped when GLaDOS giggled and gave him a shove.

“Isn’t she cute, Chell?” Wheatley asked, looking down at her. “I love it when she does that. Bloody adorable.”

“I am not adorable.”

“Are too.”

“I am not.”

“Are too.”

“I am –“

“You’ve had this discussion before, I’m guessing,” Chell interrupted, and Wheatley laughed.

“All the time. Change her mind one day, I will.” He nuzzled her lovingly, and she sighed.

“If ‘one day’ really means ‘never’.”

Wheatley continued to lean on GLaDOS, looking very contented, until GLaDOS abruptly stiffened and shoved him away. “He already _knows_ ,” Wheatley protested.

“I don’t care.”

“Who knows what?” Chell asked, but her question was answered when a pale man with scruffy black hair stepped into the room, his eyes immediately locked on GLaDOS.

“GLaDOS,” he said, nodding once, his voice rough with disuse.

“Dr Rattmann,” GLaDOS returned, nodding once as well. “To what do I owe this honour.”

“Heard there’s a war on,” he answered, shrugging and stuffing his hands into his pockets. “Bet there aren’t too many of you on Team Aperture, either.”

“Of course not,” GLaDOS answered. “I can deal with it myself, however.”

“That’s not the point,” he said, grinning at her, and GLaDOS shook her core.

“Why did I not just get rid of you?”

“Must be that pesky conscience acting up again.”

“Who is this, GLaDOS?” Chell asked, and GLaDOS gave her a glance.

“My resident graffiti artist, Dr Douglas Rattmann. Also the man who sicced you on me in the first place.”

“You’re the one who drew all over the walls?” Chell asked. He didn’t look like he knew how to draw.

“That was me.”

“On a more useful note, he also saved your life. After you heartlessly caused me to be thrown in pieces into my own parking lot, the Party Escort retrieved you to be put back into testing. Unfortunately for you, it put you into one of the Extended Relaxation Vaults, and when I went offline, so did the main power grid. The main Relaxation Vaults have their own individual oxygen supplies, but that was not where I was keeping most of the test subjects. Dr Rattmann patched your Vault into the reserve power grid, which I was luckily still holding together for you, and you lived to test another day.”

Chell stepped forward, extending a hand, and Rattmann grinned and took it. “I never thought I’d actually meet you,” he said, sounding a little awestruck. “I knew she’d let you go, but I never expected you would come back…”

Chell’s eyebrows quirked. “Haven’t you heard? We’re best friends.”

“I wouldn’t say _best_ ,” GLaDOS spoke up quickly. “Somewhere slightly above ‘acquaintances’, I’d say.”

Chell grinned and waved her hand behind her. “She’s a little tetchy right now. Wheatley keeps telling her she’s adorable.”

Rattmann started laughing, taking his hand back and using it to cover his eyes, and GLaDOS made an angry electronic noise. “ _Chell_!”  

“If you weren’t so adorable I’d have nothing to tell Dr Rattmann about,” Chell said teasingly, and Wheatley made a sound in triumph. She turned around in time to see him press himself into her, overjoyed, and GLaDOS groaned.

“Get off me. She doesn’t agree with you, she’s making fun of me.”

“I’ll take it how I want to!” he said cheerfully.

“Hello, Wheatley,” Rattmann said, holding his left hand up in greeting, and Wheatley nodded to him.

“’allo. Come to help us out, have you?”

“When you wake up one day and find out you’re not even in the same state, well, you kind of decide you should figure out what’s going on.”

“Such a lazy man,” GLaDOS remarked to Wheatley. “I should have kicked him out a long time ago.”

“Now who is this?” Magnusson declared, stepping into the room and throwing up his hands. “Let me guess. Some other essential personnel of yours!”

“That’s correct,” GLaDOS answered. “This is my handyman. Though he thinks he’s an artist. Bennett. Though everything he draws is remarkably unflattering.”

“You clearly have no idea how hard you are to draw,” Rattmann snorted.

“Oh, you need your _handyman_ at these meetings now,” Magnusson sneered. “Your _artist_ handyman who _can’t draw_.”    

“He can draw conclusions, and that’s all he needs to do. If he’s volunteering his aid, I shall accept. Are you volunteering, Dr Rattmann?”

“Indeed I am,” Rattmann said, moving to stand next to Chell.

“We need fewer people at these proceedings, not more!” Magnusson declared hotly, clenching his fists.

“Then you can leave. As I’ve mentioned previously. There will be no loss if you do, I assure you. I have more than enough consenting allies to win this war myself.”

Their arguing was interrupted by the arrivals of Dr Kleiner and Gordon, as well as Alyx. Unfortunately for Team Aperture, Chell stopped paying attention after that because she was far too engrossed in watching Wheatley make faces at everything Dr Kleiner said and wondering how long GLaDOS was going to be able to put up with Dr Magnusson before she flipped him right out of the room. She was going to catch it from GlaDOS for that, she knew, but Chell had no interest at all in battle plans or militia training. She wasn’t even going to be taking part in the exercises, as far as she knew. GLaDOS seemed content with letting Chell do whatever she wanted, as long as she did something. That spoke volumes about the

“Chell,” GLaDOS said somewhat tiredly, and Chell realised she hadn’t at all been paying attention for the last little bit. She glanced up, re-evaluating her surroundings to find that everyone had left. She tried not to cringe, biting on the inside of her lip a little. Chell was not afraid of GLaDOS, of course, but she did respect her quite a lot. Not paying attention when you were supposed to be helping your friend plan a war was a terrible way of demonstrating that respect. “You can go.”

“Sorry,” Chell shrugged, wondering a little offhandedly where Doug had gone. She’d meant to catch him before he disappeared again. “That wasn’t very… exciting.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll try to spice it up for you next time. Tell a few jokes, perhaps.”

Chell had to stare, very hard, straight at the wall in front of her to abstain from rolling her eyes. “Nobody wants to hear your jokes, GLaDOS.”

“I do!” Wheatley volunteered, and Chell felt a jolt of adrenalin in response to his voice. Of course he hadn’t left. She decided against mentioning she hadn’t been able to see him and looked up.

“Let’s not upset everybody more, Wheatley,” she told him.

“I don’t care if they’re upset,” GLaDOS said. “ _I’m_ upset having to put up with their idiocy whenever they think it’s reasonable. Which is never. But they seem to have convinced themselves of the opposite.”

“Mm,” shrugged Wheatley. “Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. ‘s gonna be you that fixes ev’rything in the end. Let them feel like they’re contributing ‘n all that so they think you’re equals, right?”

GLaDOS actually laughed at that. “That’s right,” she agreed. “Compliance rhymes with Science, after all, and I can’t get them to commit to the Science if I can’t get them to comply.”

“Did you guys just… agree on something?” Chell asked, trying to be as serious as possible, but not quite able to contain the smile on her face.

“What a clever little lunatic you are,” GLaDOS answered sardonically. “Observations like that are certain to be of value in the future. Or they would be. If you made observations when I actually needed them to be made.”

“I was paying attention, luv!” Wheatley declared in excitement, moving around in front of her. “I remember all of it, I do! Or um… at least… well, a good part of. Some. You know. A bit.”

“You will be contributing later,” she told him. “I don’t care what you retain from these meetings. Your job is to be a visual representation of my authority.”

“A what?”

“You’re her sidekick,” Chell answered.

“Ooh,” he murmured to himself, looking at the floor and no doubt imagining what little he knew of superheroes. GLaDOS shook her core.

“That had better never happen, or we’re all doomed.”

“Momma!” Carrie yelled, barrelling into the room and surprising Chell a second time. Neither GLaDOS nor Wheatley reacted at all to her rather boisterous entrance, so it seemed they were long used to such a thing.

“What.”

Carrie started to babble on about some aspect of the meeting that Chell had missed entirely, and when she was finished GLaDOS looked down at Chell, staring in as pointed a way as she could.

“Why is it that the _only_ person who was paying attention was the one who is to have no part in this?”

Chell shrugged. “You’re her mom, so… that’s your fault.”

“ _I_ was paying attention!” Wheatley insisted.

“That’s debateable. Anyway. All of you are going to have to find some other means of entertainment. I need to think.”

Wheatley was visibly displeased about this, but he only nodded and told Carrie to come along with him. Chell hung back.

“I said _all_ of you. That includes you.”

“Let me know what you need me to do,” Chell said firmly. GLaDOS nodded once.

“I have a lot of planning to do before I decide on that.”

Chell echoed her nod and left the room, hoping she would be able to track down Doug before she needed to head back home.

  

    

 


	67. Part Sixty-Seven.  The Readying

**Part Sixty-Seven. The Readying**

The next three weeks were very stressful.

Wheatley knew he really had nothing to complain about. He had no calculations to run, no battles to plan, and no world to save. But he worried about GLaDOS. Constantly. All day long, no matter what he was doing or who he was talking to, he worried about her. A piece of his mind was always on her, wondering how or what she was doing. He was, again, honestly scared of the intensity of his thoughts. But he could not stop them, or even slow them down, so he just tried to think them and then let them go. It didn’t always work. But it was all he could do.

It was on the second morning that she’d given him the news.

“Wheatley, I have a job for you,” she’d said matter-of-factly, not looking at him.

“A… a job?” he’d asked hesitantly.

“Yes. I’m putting you in charge of the repurposed testing tracks.”

“Me?” He’d been so surprised he couldn’t even think. “But… I’ve never even built one before!”

“I’ve already built them. And the panels know enough now to move themselves as you see fit. However. What I mainly need you to do is to come up with games for the humans. They learn better when they feel as though there’s no pressure on them to do so. I need you to make the training fun for them.”

“Oh, well… I guess I could do that,” he’d said, a frown coming across his optic. “But…”

“If you do need to modify the testing tracks, show Caroline what you’re doing. Reassure her that I’m not backing out of my promise. But if you’re doing it anyway she might as well do it with you.”

“Are you sending me away?” he’d asked quietly. She’d lifted her core to look at him slowly, shaking it in denial.

“No,” she’d answered softly. “You have no idea how much I’d prefer to keep you here. I’m going to be stuck here, dealing with humans all day. Having meetings and hearing plans and trying to get a little real work done while they tell me whatever things they think are important. But I genuinely need you to do this. If the humans aren’t sufficiently prepared, that places a lot more pressure on us.”

“Us? You haven’t told me my role, what I’ll be doing when the, the Combine comes.”

“I meant myself and the systems. The panels. Surveillance. The mainframe. And so on. No, you… don’t really have a role in that. You’re just going to stay here with me, as far as I know.”

“Can’t I do that now as well?” he’d asked, unable to think of a task he’d like to be given more.

She’d shaken her head and given him a shove. “What I’ve told you to do is more important. So go get started. Take Caroline with you.”

“I wish you were your first priority, for once,” he’d told her sulkily, and she’d laughed a little.

“That’s the point. Go. Train those humans for me.”

He’d pressed himself into her, hard, and then sadly gone to do as she’d asked. It was really rather fun to come up with odd little testing tracks to train the humans in, and it was just as fun to shout at them as they ran the courses. Carrie was helping him with that on occasion, though she usually pestered him to make her a little track too so she could race the humans to the finish. He hoped she didn’t realise he was cheating a little bit; the humans were being trained with live turrets and lasers and such, but he didn’t want her having any part of that. Anything dangerous was carefully timed to miss her by at least two seconds. She seemed to be having a whale of a time, though, so even if she did notice she didn’t seem to care.

The humans were doing their part splendidly, and he was quite proud of the fact that they were actually learning something under his supervision. What a wonderful accomplishment, that! Twenty years too late, give or take, though, and that was a shame. He’d’ve liked to have stuck it to those snotty scientists who’d thought he wasn’t much good for anything. He just needed a bit of encouragement and creative freedom, that was all. Look at him now! He was making a positive contribution to something tremendously important.

GLaDOS had rebuilt the hunters and redesigned her military androids to mimic the movements of the Combine infantry, which the Resistance fired on with non-lethal rounds. Many of the humans had been amazed with the similarities between her robots and the real thing, and a good number of them, or the ones that finished, often behaved as though they’d won the war itself. As predicted, Caroline was put out that Wheatley was showing her the ropes instead of GLaDOS, but she soon forgot about her complaints when the humans entered the tracks. Sometimes that strange Dog robot would go in there with them, and she would get especially excited, cheering him on and jumping up and down. Every so often she would ask for a break and Wheatley would nod, and she would chase the robot wherever he went. Wheatley would be a little less distracted, and think about GLaDOS a little more. She’d given him a job to do, though he didn’t know if it were to keep him from worrying or not. But if that was what it was designed to do, it didn’t work.

Caroline would go into GLaDOS’s chamber to say goodnight to her, which Wheatley could tell relieved her to no end. But she was always tired and listless, so Wheatley did not attempt to talk to her. He would just tell her good night and press himself into her, and would stare into the darkness for a while, listening as she continued working on whatever it was she deemed important. During the second week he’d hesitantly asked if he could wipe down her chassis, and she’d agreed. She was so tense that it caused her actual pain, which she only expressed in the barest of gasps, but after a while she relaxed considerably. When he was finished he went down beside her, and she’d sighed in relief and nuzzled him tenderly.

“Thank you,” she’d said softly. “I needed that.”

“You could’ve asked,” he’d told her.

“You know when I need it more than I do,” she’d answered.

They’d been able to have a bit of a chat that night, where GLaDOS filled Wheatley in on how the planning was going and Wheatley told GLaDOS about some of the more interesting things that went on during the modified testing, and she’d seemed very pleased to hear that the humans were progressing so well. “I might not have to fight this war all on my own,” she’d said thoughtfully.

“We’re going to uh, to get them to work on um, on being quiet, tomorrow,” he’d told her, a little shyly.

“Good idea. It’s easier to take people out when they don’t know you’re there.”

“It’s… it’s a good idea, Gladys?”

She’d given him a shove. “You’ve changed a lot, you know.”

“I’ve tried to.”

“You have.”

Wheatley honestly had no idea how he’d gotten on in life without her.

 

 

“How have Orange and Blue been doing?” GLaDOS asked the next morning, almost as soon as he’d woken up. He was unable to understand her for a few moments.

“They’re… they’re quite helpful,” he said, a little blearily. “The humans like it when they uh, when they’re out. Think they’re cute.”

She nodded slowly. “Do you… talk to them, at all?”

“Sometimes,” he shrugged. “Just to uh, to say ‘allo an’ all that. We chat a little ‘bout how the humans are doing, now and then.”

She shifted uneasily.

“Why d’you ask?” It was sort of a weird question, when she could probably just give them a ring herself.

“I haven’t… spoken to them for a while now.”

“What?” he gasped in disbelief as he turned to face her, fully online now. “You haven’t – why not?”

“They were angry with me,” she answered. “When you were gone, I… forgot about them. They became… ill, is how they referred to it, and they were angry that I did nothing about it. They no longer wanted to hear from me because they thought I didn’t care about them. And at the time… it was true. It was nothing against them. I didn’t care about anything. But I have to admit I didn’t… appreciate them very much before that, either. So. That’s why I’m asking. They wanted me to cease communication and I did.”

Wheatley sighed.

“Gladys, they didn’t mean _forever_.”

“I’m not going to make that decision for them. That’s part of why they were upset.”

“Okay, I got that,” Wheatley told her in exasperation. “You’re trying to be less bossy. We know. But Gladys, since when’ve they ever uh, ever made the trip in here on their own? Do they ever, ever come to see you without your permission? They’re not talking to you not because they don’t _want_ to, but because that’s um, that’s the way it’s always _been_.”

“Oh,” GLaDOS said, sounding almost dumbfounded than he’d ever heard her. “That’s… really all it is?”

“Yeah,” Wheatley answered, though to be honest he was really guessing. “They’re not angry. They’re not um, they don’t talk to you because that’s not, it isn’t something that usually happens. ‘s all it is.”

“So...” She paused and looked at the wall for a moment. “There’s something I know I’m going to need done, when the Combine break through the outer line of defense.”

“They’re gonna get in here?” Wheatley asked, horrified. “But… isn’t that the uh, the point of all the humans, and the training, and – “

“Yes,” she interrupted. “However. I’m not relying on humans to keep the facility safe. That would be inconceivably stupid. I must operate under the notion that they will breach the defenses and enter the facility, and when they do they will be bringing certain equipment with them that I will be incapable of personally disabling. I’m going to need to send people to disable them for me. The plan at this time is to acquire some capable humans, if such a thing exists, and have them do it. But if it is as you say, and they are not upset – and the fact that I am only communicating with them to have them do something for me does not upset them – I would much prefer to send them.”

“D’you want me to fetch them for you?” he asked gently. She shook her core.

“I don’t know.”

He decided that was as good a yes as any and headed out.

He found them cleaning up the test chamber they’d been helping him out with earlier; well, they were sort of cleaning it up. They seemed to have gotten distracted and elected to throw Cubes at each other instead. He made a throat-clearing noise and they jumped, turning around. Atlas tilted his core upwards inquisitively.

“She wants to talk to you,” he said quietly. P-body straightened attentively, but Atlas pulled her back down and narrowed his optic, waving a hand at him suspiciously, palm up and fingers splayed.

“She thinks you’re upset with her,” Wheatley said, guessing what Atlas wanted to know. “She’s… trying not to make the decision of going to see her for you. Bit of an odd standoff, really. She’s waiting for you to uh, to contact her and you’re um, waiting on the same thing. But she um, it’s alright if you make the first move. Really, it is. She’s not tried to talk to you because she’s trying to be consid’rate.”

P-body again made to move towards Wheatley, chirping eagerly, and Atlas followed a bit more reluctantly. The three of them travelled through the facility and entered her chamber together, and out of the corner of his optic Wheatley saw Atlas take P-body’s hand as he returned to his place at GLaDOS’s side.

The two of them stood in front of her, so as to force her to acknowledge them, he supposed. She regarded them without speaking. Then P-body waved at her.

“Hello,” GLaDOS returned sombrely. “What is it.”

 _Wheatley said you wanted to talk to us,_ Atlas said gruffly, and Wheatley jumped upon hearing him. He hadn’t really expected GLaDOS to translate.

“Yes,” she answered slowly. “I have a job for you. If you want it.”

Atlas frowned, but P-body nodded rapidly. _Of course we do!_

 _Do we?_ Atlas said, glancing at her, and GLaDOS moved back a little. He regarded her sternly.

_Wheatley said you didn’t want to force us to come and see you._

“That’s what I said, yes.”

_You never want us to come see you anyway._

“I don’t mind if you do that,” she answered softly. “I realise now that’s what I led you to believe, but… it’s not true.”

 _Even so,_ Atlas pressed, _you don’t care about us like you care about_ them _._

Wheatley frowned and looked at GLaDOS, but she remained silent.

 _He’s right,_ P-body said, sounding sad. _You don’t love us like you love_ them _._

GLaDOS sighed heavily.

“No. I don’t love you. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care. This past year, no, I didn’t. But I didn’t care about anything. I didn’t care about anyone. I would not have noticed if most of you had gone missing.”

 _That’s not encouraging, Central Core,_ Atlas said, accusation in every word.

She nodded reluctantly. “I know that. However. The mainframe was in control of the facility. Not me. It cut me off from everything. I was only allowed to communicate with Surveillance and the panels, and the mainframe only allowed that to keep them quiet. It was through some very persistent outside contact that I regained control of things at all. Without going too much into detail, let me just say that if things had gone a little differently, we would all be dead. Because I didn’t care enough to fix anything, let alone you.”

 _Dead, Central Core?_ P-body squeaked.

“I was told the mainframe was endeavouring to destroy me. It failed to take into account the sentience of the other systems. Between the three people that kept pestering me, I became motivated enough to take my facility back.” She told the story in quite a flat sort of voice, as if she didn’t want to remember it. It was certainly less dramatic than the version she gave Carrie.

 _Central Core, we didn’t know_ , P-body said frantically, stepping forward. _If we had known, we would have –_

GLaDOS silenced her with a shake of her core. “I didn’t tell you that so you would feel sympathy for me. I just wanted you to know it wasn’t personal.”

The two bots traded a glance.

 _We should have come to check on you,_ Atlas said finally. _We knew something was wrong. We knew Wheatley was gone. But we didn’t._

 _We were jealous,_ P-body continued in a quieter voice. _We knew you wouldn’t have reacted that way if something had happened to us._

“You’re right,” GLaDOS told them. “I wouldn’t have. And I have no excuse. But I will be honest and say that’s probably not going to change. I doubt I will ever love you. But that does not mean I do not care.”

 _Why don’t you ever ask us to come see you, then?_ Atlas demanded. GLaDOS studiously avoided looking at all of them, even as P-body took another step forward.

“I don’t know what to say to you,” she answered eventually. “The person who built you no longer really exists. And before you get confused, what that means is… I have changed a lot since I built you. I do not have a purpose for you anymore. And if you have no purpose, I… don’t know what to do with you.”

 _You don’t know what to do, Central Core,_ Atlas said, disbelievingly. GLaDOS made an uncomfortable noise and looked at the wall.

“I don’t know how to talk to you. The only thing connecting us was testing. After I ceased sending you out… I no longer felt we had anything in common.”

 _But we do!_ P-body stood straight, even more excited than usual. _We care about each other, Central Core! And I would say that’s extremely significant!_

 _She’s right_ , Atlas said gruffly. _That’s the most important part. It’s easy to find little things in common when you have something as large as that connecting you._

“Top-down processing…,” GLaDOS said thoughtfully. “I understand.”

“I don’t,” Wheatley said hurriedly. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Top-down processing is when you deduce the parts from the whole,” GLaDOS explained, turning to him at last. “I’ve always looked at interaction as a bottom-up sequence.   I should have thought of doing it the other way around.”

Wheatley shook his core. Why she felt the need to make everything about science, he’d never guess.

“So,” she said resolutely, moving to face her bots, “are we settled?”

They both gave her a firm nod. _On one condition,_ Atlas said quickly.

“And what would that be?” GLaDOS asked suspiciously.

 _You are being too nice,_ P-body said, spreading her hands in a disbelieving sort of way. _It’s creepy!_

GLaDOS laughed, a nod signaling her acquiescence. “Very well. I’ll try to be more unpleasant. I didn’t realise you liked it so much.”

The bots said something in answer, but Wheatley didn’t know what because GLaDOS decided then to stop translating. That was a little disappointing, but maybe she hadn’t realised she was doing it in the first place. They stood a little straighter before her, as if to receive orders, and sure enough GLaDOS said:

“All right, you marshmallows. I’ve got a job for you. And if you screw this one up, that means the end of the world. You don’t want to be responsible for ending the world, do you?”

The two bots shook their cores, and GLaDOS leaned forward. “I’ve set up Surveillance to communicate with you. The Combine are going to bring a piece of machinery called an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, generator. If they manage to set it off, everything is over. You need to find and disable it before they do. Surveillance will alert you when they’ve brought it in. It will be on one of the lower levels, out of my jurisdiction. I’m sure you remember your missions below modern Aperture.”

They nodded, both looking very serious.

“Good. You’re going to need your Portal Devices. I’m serious. If you fail, the world may well be at an end. Everything we’ve fought for, everything we’ve built… they’re trying to take it from us. That _cannot_ happen. Even if you fail at everything else I ever ask you to do, you _must_ succeed at this. I cannot stress that enough.”

They nodded again and chirped at her, and she just looked at them for a long moment.

“And…” Her voice was surprisingly soft and wavery, and Wheatley found himself looking down at her in concern. “For God’s sake, come back in one piece. Both of you.”

They regarded her quietly, seeming to study her.

“Atlas. Come here,” she said, still in that soft voice, and he stepped forward, looking a little confused. She moved forward quickly, closing the gap between them, and pressed her optic assembly into Atlas’s core. Atlas looked at her confusedly, arms spread, but P-body poked him in the back and he jolted, clasping GLaDOS’s core tightly. She shoved him away after a few moments, saying, “P-body,” and she leapt joyfully into GLaDOS’s core. GLaDOS held her with the same sad intensity she had Atlas, and P-body backed away of her own free will, moving to stand with her partner. GLaDOS again watched them silently.

“I’m counting on you,” she told them. “Don’t disappoint me.”

The two bots regarded each other for a long moment, and that mutual understanding they had passed between them. Simultaneously, Atlas and P-body threw their arms around GLaDOS’s core, and she pushed her chassis into theirs as best she was able. Then they stepped back, waving and running for the doorway. P-body paused and chirped, holding one finger up to GLaDOS, and Atlas raised one fist and related something in a serious tone. A good handful of seconds after they’d left, GLaDOS was still staring out the doorway after them. She abruptly pulled back, shaking her head morosely. “Wheatley, can you… pray… for them?” she asked, so quietly he almost didn’t hear. “Does the… God of AI do that?”

“Sure he does,” Wheatley said reassuringly, though he really had no idea. “What… what’d they say, sweetheart?”

She said nothing for a minute or so.

“’Don’t worry, Mom. We’re going to make you proud.’”

Wheatley wanted to cry. He wished he hadn’t asked, because it was such a terribly private thing, but he forced that back and moved towards her, pressing himself into her. “They’ll be okay,” he whispered. “You trained them well.”

She sighed and shoved him off of her, and though he was a bit put out that she was doing that while he was trying to help her, he soon saw why.

“You sure you don’t want me in here with you?” Chell asked, after she’d stepped through the doorway.

“If you’re out there wreaking as much as havoc as you should be, you don’t need to be in here,” GLaDOS answered. “So get out of here. Go show that crowbar-swinging husband of yours how a _real_ lunatic does it.”

Chell laughed, shrugging and folding her arms together. “Just thought I’d check and see if you’d changed your mind.”

“No, you’re not staying in here and watching me do all the work. There’s plenty for you out there. Thin them out for me. I still haven’t gotten rid of all the dead ones sitting in the basement.”

“Choking up the lower passageways?”

“Something like that.”

They regarded each other for a long moment, and then Chell turned to Wheatley. “You know what to do, Wheatley,” she said, offering her hand, and he smiled and shook it. “Just don’t do it too well.”

“We’ll all do our part,” he told her, shrugging. “Good luck out there.”

“And you,” she nodded, going back to watching GLaDOS.

“Well. What are you waiting for.”

“This isn’t goodbye,” Chell said seriously. “I’m coming back. We’re all coming back.”

“That’s not how it works,” GLaDOS told her, just as seriously. “Someone always dies.”

“Sure. In _regular_ wars. But this time we’re both fresh and ready to go. We always win. You do what you do and I’ll do the same. We’ll kick them back to Xen if we have to.”

“We can’t. There’s no portal back to that world.”

Chell’s eyes sparkled. “And you have no idea how to open one.”

“I might have an inkling.”

“Means she’s got, got robots there, checking out the place now,” Wheatley muttered, and Chell laughed.     

“He knows you too well. All right. I’ll get going. But only because I have to beat Gordon to the weaponry. Thinks he’s a better shot than me.” She stepped directly in front of GLaDOS, unfolding her arms. “But I’m not going without a hug from my best friend.”

GLaDOS neither fought her nor denied her personal need. Wheatley looked away when Chell’s face fell into sadness. GLaDOS must have been pressing very hard.

“This is not goodbye,” she repeated firmly, moving back and looking GLaDOS directly in the optic. “We’ve still got to swap those mom stories, remember?”

“That depends on whether you know better than to step into the path of an approaching bullet. I taught you how to avoid them, but I’ve no doubt you’ve forgotten by now.”

“We’ll see soon enough. Wheatley? Keep her in line, will you?”

“Me?” Wheatley asked, horrified, and Chell laughed and left the room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note:  
> So  
> Hi  
> I wrote this and forgot I wrote it. That’s what happens when you write a bunch of stuff ahead of time and then don’t really have an ordering system for all of it. It’s been a while so all those Part X’s really don’t mean anything to me.  
> No, I don’t know when the next part is coming. I wrote some of it when I originally wrote this part but it’s the second half of the chapter so I have to write the first half. I stopped writing this so much because I started drawing again and I usually draw constantly or write constantly and I guess I went into the drawing stage there. But there is a lot left to publish and I will finish it, even if it takes me another year and all of you disappear to other fandoms and whatnot. Congrats for making it this far. This thing is the longest Portal fanfic on the archive and it’s like the size of five novels. I really am gonna make it to a million words one day.


	68. Part Sixty-Eight - The Days Before

**Part Sixty-Eight. The Days Before**

At some point GLaDOS had raised a good number of monitors in her chamber, all of them filled with all sorts of different data that Wheatley didn’t understand. He didn’t ask her about them because if she was putting out visual aids that meant she was trying to concentrate, but he hadn’t the fuzziest what all those numbers and coloured dots had to do with anything.

The one bit of meaning he did grasp from it was that the time they’d been preparing for was soon. This was due in part to the fact that there were people coming into her chamber every hour or so. Chell came in several times, not really doing anything so far’s Wheatley could tell, but GLaDOS seemed the barest bit relieved by her presence.

GLaDOS barely spoke to any of them, including Wheatley, and though that grated on him he did not say anything about it. When night came and the humans stopped visiting, he would sit next to her and just talk. He knew she wanted him to, and he did his best to think of things to say, but he hated that he could only talk _to_ her and not _with_ her. That day especially he knew a chat was out, given the events of that afternoon:

GLaDOS had been discussing some aspect of battle plans or some such, Wheatley hadn’t been listening – and he tried, he really did, but it was just so _dull_ – when all of a sudden her hard drive hitched and shocked him back into paying attention.

“It’d make things so much easier,” one of the male humans had been saying. He’d had dark hair down to his shoulders, some of it tied behind his head with a rubber band. He had looked at his fingernails as he spoke, studiously ignoring GLaDOS. “Then there’d be no _need_ for any of this. Just send out a whole bunch’a robots and smoke the bastards. No need to put _us_ on the line.”

“So,” GLaDOS had said, even that one syllable cold and harsh, “you expect me to outfit you. Supply you. House you. And then, after doing all of that work to ensure you are of at least a modicum of use, you expect me to _also_ fight on your behalf? With no contribution from you whatsoever? In a fight that _you_ started?”

The human had looked up at GLaDOS boredly from beneath the heavy line of hair above his eyes. “That’s what robots are for. They do stuff we tell ‘em to do. That’s why we build them.”

“But you _wouldn’t_ be building them. _I_ would be building them.”

“Yeah but we built you so… we really are building them, by extension. You’re wasting time. I hope you’re building those bots while you’re here yapping.”

GLaDOS had emitted a burst of white noise at a frequency that Wheatley had been pretty sure was out of the audible range of the humans, and he’d made the snap decision to cut the meeting sharpish, before something happened all of them would regret. He’d moved forward, which caused GLaDOS to glance at him sharply, but she stayed quiet as he called out, “Um, I think it’s time we uh, we went our sep’rate ways for now, y’know, so we can uh… can think about what we’ve just discussed. A’right? A’right. Off you go then!”

The humans had, a little confusedly to be sure, filtered out, and he’d gone off to find Carrie for a bit because he’d known GLaDOs probably wanted to stew for a while. She’d begged him to build her a set of testing tracks she could run through with that Dog thing, and he’d obliged cheerfully, making a few of them a contest and a few of them cooperative. For the competitive tracks, he’d carefully done his best to make sure she couldn’t lose, but without being too obvious about it, and judging by how happy she was at the end of it all it seemed he’d succeeded.

And so when that’d all ended he’d taken his place next to GLaDOS and rambled on for a while, but to be quite honest he was getting bored of the sound of his own voice every night. He wanted to talk to her, for Pete’s sake! – whoever Pete was – but there’d been very little of _that_ going on lately!

“Wheatley,” she said, and he yelled and nearly – well, no, he probably _didn’t_ nearly jump out of his case, but it certainly felt like that was what he was doing. He turned to look at her, aperture wide. Was he actually going to get a conversation out of her while she was working? Amazing!

“Uh… what is it?” he stammered, suddenly wondering if she was about to tell him to stop talking or go away or something like that. He hoped not. He didn’t _think_ he’d been overly disruptive, but it was not always easy to tell.

“Thank you for… _defusing_ the situation, earlier,” she answered, still not looking at him like she’d not really been doing the last while. “I-“

“’s okay,” he interrupted, shrugging at the floor. “Gotta be of some use, haven’t I?”

Now she _was_ looking at him, he could feel it, but now he was nervous because he’d realised he’d just put himself down again and she didn’t like that. Sure enough, she sighed, but didn’t go any farther than that.

“This will be over soon,” she said instead, and now he did look at her. “In approximately three days, the Combine will be within attack range. We will be ready. I’m tired of having humans constantly underfoot. I’m going to crush the Combine and send everyone on their way.”

Wheatley smiled at her. “Sounds like a plan! I’d be glad to uh, to uh… to spend time with you, again.”

She nodded and made a noise in agreement. “I’d like that as well, believe me. Working day and night for the humans again is not something I wanted to do. I know you don’t like to be left alone for so long, but… I _must_ be prepared.”

He shrugged. He didn’t really want to get into it, to be honest. He did his best not to think about it, because when he did he had to remember that he could not talk to her the next day. So he decided _not_ to think about it, and began to talk to her as per usual. He’d been with her in that dreadful meeting for much the whole day, so there wasn’t much to say other than that bit about gallivanting with Carrie – and that was the word he used, _gallivanting_ , because he was quite proud of remembering such a word – and after he’d summarised that he moved on to making something up to talk about. It was, as it was often, something he vaguely remembered telling himself while he was in space. It was really stupid, honestly, about what he’d imagined might’ve been the purpose of all those sparkly bits in the sky. He’d imagined, on occasion, that it was the millions of tiny optics of the God of AI watching him and reminding him every day that he’d done something horrible he could never take back. On the other occasions, one of which he was recounting right now, he’d imagined he hadn’t really been banished and was just taking part in an experiment of some sort. He’d liked that thought more than being scrutinised by the God of AI.

He’d gotten about halfway through when he realised… well, he thought GLaDOS’d stopped working altogether and just started listening. He didn’t know if it’d happened just then or when he hadn’t been paying attention, but she seemed quieter and colder than he recalled. He resolved to stay cool and continue on as if he’d not noticed. Though he probably sounded quite a bit more excited.

That didn’t last too much longer, though, because as happened every night, he started to lose track of where he was due to that involuntary shut-down thing called ‘falling asleep’. Usually he didn’t mind too much, because GLaDOS wasn’t talking to him anyway, but he cared _now_!

GLaDOS sighed.

“Go to sleep,” she told him in a soft voice, as though there were any actual _choice_ in the matter on his part. Maybe she thought there was. They’d never really discussed the whole falling asleep thing, just sort of acknowledged that it was a thing that was happening and leaving it at that. But, God, these small hours were the _only_ time he got alone with her! And they weren’t even very _much,_ because she was barely even _there_ during them, and it was just not fair, just not fair at all. He thought he made a staticky noise in frustration. He wasn’t sure. Wasn’t really sure of anything, anymore.

“Ssh,” GLaDOS said.

 

 

She was awake when he went to sleep and when he woke up, and every day he asked her if she was tired. Every day she shook her core and said, “I feel like I should be, but I’m not. I feel fine.”

This morning she’d put up a countdown clock to go with all her other monitors, and Wheatley suddenly got a terrible sense of foreboding. A _countdown clock_. That meant… that meant things were just about ready to go, didn’t it? That… that there was gonna be a bunch of aliens swarming towards the Enrichment Centre to attack them all? He glanced nervously at her, but if she herself was anxious at all she did not show it.

“Find Caroline,” she told him. “I’ll give her that job she wants and get that over with – “

Before the sound had quite finished fading from her speakers, her chamber seemed to go quite cold suddenly. Wheatley narrowed his optic in alarm, pulling in his handles, as GLaDOS drew back slowly. “Luv, what just – is something – “

“Shut up.”

Her voice was hard and, though he did not appreciate that, he elected to do as she wanted. She had some idea of what the problem was, and he did not. Though he would’ve, if she would bother telling him. Ah, now he was making himself annoyed. Bloody great.

“Everything… is going according to plan, my dear,” came a faint and rasping voice, and Wheatley jumped, looking down to see a _man_ standing there below him! A very, very pale man, who honestly looked more like a humanoid robot than an actual human, looking calmly up at GLaDOS with the strangest blue eyes Wheatley’d ever seen in a human’s head. GLaDOS directed her core at him smoothly and somewhat carelessly.

“They are.”

“The question is,” the man continued, smiling the barest bit, “ _whose_ plan.”

“You don’t seem terribly eager to find out. You _are_ taking your time, after all.”

The smile crept wider. “I wanted to… give you one more chance. We go back a long way, after all. Don’t we.”

“If you want to believe that.”

“Have you changed your mind… Caroline?”

Wheatley snapped his optic in her direction, but she seemed to have been expecting that and did not move herself. The only change at all was in the speed of her fans, and even that was barely noticeable, especially when he thought about how loud they’d been before.

“No.”

He jerked his head to the left and raised his brows. “Give me the ship and I will… leave you be. Last… offer.”

“No.”

The man stepped back once, his face settling back into blankness. “In that case… be prepared to lose… everything.”

GLaDOS met his gaze, remaining impassive and disturbingly calm. “I wouldn’t bet on that, if I were you. You waited far too long. Your mistake. My advantage.”

“I do not make… mistakes.”

“Oh, but you do,” GLaDOS told him, with a distinct air of amusement. “Three times now you thought I would make a deal with you. And for the third time, I’m refusing. So. Continue on your merry way so I can finally crush you and stop you from pestering me. Because that’s getting remarkably annoying.”

The man frowned and, right before the both of them, simply vanished into thin air! Wheatley gawped at the vacated panel on the floor, trying to figure out how such a thing’d _possibly_ happened, when GLaDOS snapped, “Wheatley!”

“Wha?” he gasped, looking back at her.

“Did I not ask you to retrieve Caroline?”

“Uh… yeah. Yeah, you did. Um… yeah. I’ll go do that.” And he headed out before she decided to snap at him again.

Carrie was chattering with Atlas and P-body so he didn’t interrupt, just waited until she noticed he was there and then told her why he was there. She gave a nod and followed him back to GLaDOS’s chamber.

“Caroline,” GLaDOS told her, almost as soon as they arrived, “I’m sending you to Miss Vance. She –“

“She’s not fighting outside?” Caroline interrupted, and GLaDOS shook her core.

“She has experience in the computer sciences. So I’m putting her in charge of the military androids.”

Wheatley frowned. “We actually _have_ those?”

“No,” GLaDOS answered dryly. “I’m sending the both of them to pretend to do something useful instead of _actually_ having them do something useful.”

Wheatley supposed he should have expected that and elected to shut up.

“Anyway. Since you two get along together so well, she’s stuck with you. I don’t know _how_ you’re going to be of help to her, exactly, but I’m sure you’ll figure something out.”

Carrie nodded quickly and smiled. “Do I go now?”

“If you like.”

Caroline moved in to give GLaDOS a little cuddle, which surprisingly GLaDOS obliged to without comment, and when Caroline had gotten as far as the doorway GLaDOS called, “Do _not_ leave that room, Caroline.”

“Okay!” the little core said, and disappeared. She must’ve been _really_ eager to be useful towards the whole thing.


	69. Part Sixty-Nine - The First Contact

**Part Sixty-Nine. The First Contact**

GLaDOS then turned Wheatley’s attention to a monitor filled with coloured dots, in front of which was a thin orange line that GLaDOS said marked the perimeter of the Enrichment Centre. “After this last meeting,” she told him, “we go to war.”

“War, luv?” Wheatley asked her quietly. Well, he’d known they were about to start battling a whole lot of bad guys, but _war_?

“Mm,” was all she answered.

When the humans came in, she used the monitor she’d been showing Wheatley to explain to them where they were going to go. She organised them quickly into teams based on their abilities, and they were happy to go along with her for the most part. Many of the humans trusted her based on the sheer ability she had shown them as of late. One of them asked her how she knew where best to place them, though not in any way that suggested he was going to cause trouble. GLaDOS looked at him for a moment, gauging him to be sure.

“The… training you went through. I’ve been through all of the data. I know all of your strengths and weaknesses. Each and every one of you. If you would prefer a different placement, I would consider it, but I assure you I have analysed the data extensively and I believe I’ve developed the optimal configurations.”

The man shrugged and did not look upset at all by this news. “You know what you’re doing. I was just wondering.”

GLaDOS was taken a little aback by this, stunned into a few seconds of silence. Then she gathered herself again and went back to outlining her instructions.

That whole operation took about an hour or so and when it had concluded, Wheatley realised there was an hour left on GLaDOS’s clock. When he mentioned it, she nodded a little heavily.

“Hopefully an hour is enough time for the humans to sort themselves out.”

“And… and if it isn’t?” Wheatley asked, immediately regretting doing so. Of all the stupid things to ask…

She gave him a glance. “Then I’ll have to… hurry them up, I suppose.”

Hurrying the humans up did not usually involve benevolence from her, and he couldn’t help but ask, “And… how would you be uh, be _encouraging_ them to do that?” If it involved her usual brand of ‘persuasion’, he might have to come up with a plan dissuading her from that sort of action.

“I don’t know. Offer them cake, maybe.”

“Cake?” Wheatley asked, frowning, and when he realised the joke he had to laugh. She did too, a little, and he felt a little better to hear it.

“We’ll be alright,” she said, though not with much energy. “I estimate we can clear this up within seventy-two hours and then they can get the hell out of here.”

“Seventy-two hours is… it’s… two days?” he tried, forgetting quite where his calculator was at the moment.

“Three,” she answered. “Clean up will take a few days more, but I don’t care if the humans are around for that. They can go… do whatever humans do.”

“You mean…” He couldn’t bring himself to say it out loud so he instead whispered into her core, “interface?”

She started laughing and shoved him off of her, shaking her core. “If… _that_ is their first thought, I don’t want to know about it.”

Wheatley kind of regretted bringing it up, because now he had to think about it a little, and he shook himself in disgust and thought about finding a subject to move along to. “That’ll be nice to, to get them out of here.”

“I can’t _wait_ ,” GLaDOS remarked dryly. “Then I’ll only ever have to deal with _your_ undying need for my attention.”

“Oh, don’t act like you don’t _want_ it,” Wheatley scoffed. “You _like_ it when people fawn all over you. It, it’s the highlight of your day! Don’t deny it, we both uh, we, well, it’s true, anyway.”

“Well,” GLaDOS hedged, shifting a little uneasily, “I…”

But she couldn’t say anything to that because it _was_ true, so Wheatley just laughed.

 

 

When the hour passed and the countdown clock hit zero, GLaDOS used the monitor for more surveillance. Wheatley wasn’t sure _what_ they were looking at – it was a collection of numbers of some sort – but it held meaning for GLaDOS and that was all that mattered, really.

“They’re holding off a little bit,” GLaDOS murmured a few minutes later. “I wonder why that is…”

“Maybe they’re… scared?” he ventured, though that mysterious man didn’t seem to have been afraid of GLaDOS at all. Which was… very odd.

“No, that’s not it. Where are the Striders? Where are the Hunters? This doesn’t make any sense…”

“Luv, who… who _was_ that, that guy who was in here? And what was he after, exactly? Why’d he think you’d make a deal with him?” It probably wasn’t the best time to be asking, but he’d been holding off for quite a while now. She looked at him then, flicking her optic over him in consideration.

“I’m not certain who he is.”

That was possible, for GLaDOS to not know who someone was?

“He’s not human, that’s all I know. Information regarding him has been frustratingly elusive. He wants the _Borealis._ He wants teleportation technology. With it, the Combine could destroy the rest of the humans and continue on with their goal of… _moving in_ , I suppose you could call it.” She was looking back at the monitor with the dots on it now, tracing and re-tracing the swiftly-moving dark pixels. “He thought I would help him. He was wrong.”

“You said no to destroying all the humans.” Wheatley could barely believe such a thing. Why would she turn _that_ down?

“I thought he was human at the time. I was suspicious. What would he have to gain by destroying his own species? So I refused and sent the _Borealis_ on its merry way.”

“Hm,” Wheatley mused. “And… and what is the _Borealis,_ exactly?”

GLaDOS sighed a little, more probably than not exasperated at this line of questioning, which Wheatley had to admit was coming at a not-very-good time. “It’s a research vessel. An icebreaker. With testing apparatus onboard. A lot of the original files were destroyed when the ship was lost, so I can’t quite recall what the intent of the mission was, but I believe it had to do with seeing how humans performed tests in desolate environments with no possibility of escape.”

“I can’t imagine they’d do well,” Wheatley remarked, remembering the test subjects he’d unsuccessfully led to freedom way back before the Incident.

GLaDOS only shrugged at this news. “Not that it matters anymore.”

“What would that man want with, with an icebreaker, luv?” he asked, deciding that was a more important thing to inquire after than as to what an icebreaker was. She studied one of her screens for a long moment.

“It’s not the icebreaker he wants. Some of Aperture’s prototypical technology is on that ship; in other words, teleportation without portals. Aperture wanted a place to test this technology far from possible industrial espionage. Hence building a ship that is fully sustainable in a locale primarily consisting of inhospitable ice. It never happened, because I sent the ship away and no one was able to find it, but that was the original idea.”

“Why doesn’t he just… I dunno… invent his own… teleporting thingy?” Seemed easy enough.

It wasn’t, based on GLaDOS’s derisive burst of static. “Humans never do anything themselves they can steal from someone else.”

This was true, Wheatley mused. He’d not met a whole lot of people, let alone humans, who did that whole ‘innovation’ thing. He rather thought that GLaDOS was possibly the only person who could do such a thing without stealing from other people. Of course, she probably did borrow formulas and theories and such, but he was confident she only did that to save time. If she wanted to rebuild Science from scratch, well, he’d no doubt she could.

The discussion lapsed after that, so he studied the monitors best he could and tried to figure out what he was looking at, but all he saw were numbers and dots, and that was about it. He decided to wait for a bit before bombarding GLaDOS with questions again. He was thinking about whether or not she actually _needed_ him around, and if he could go peek in on Carrie for a minute, when she jolted back suddenly and whispered, “ _Shit_.”

Wheatley jumped a little and stared at her, optic wide. “Wha’s going on?”

“They’re running,” GLaDOS said, nothing but disbelief in every inch of her, and though Wheatley again tried to find what she was looking at on that screen, he couldn’t.

“What… d’you mean by that?” he asked hesitantly, not sure whether she wanted to discuss it or if she was just talking to herself. She stared at the monitor for a few more anxious seconds in silence.

“The humans on the west quadrant are running away. They’re not doing their jobs. They’re just… running.”

Then without warning she brought the monitor to the floor with a sudden and violent crash, and Wheatley and the panels jumped collectively as the glass shards erupted from beneath the black plastic frame. She used one of the floor panels to shovel the whole mess into the abyss below her chamber, just as aggressively as she’d dropped the monitor and when he was over the shock of it and able to look at her, he realised she was shaking just a little. Why, he didn’t know, but he resolved to find out.

“Well just, just let them go on their way, luv,” he said in as calm a voice as he could muster. “We don’t need them. They’re just, the humans, they’re only backup, right? To make things a bit easier? Not essential, not essential. They – “

“ _We can’t run, Wheatley!_ ” GLaDOS snapped, swinging ‘round a little too close for comfort, and he instinctively pulled his core tight and backed away. “We don’t have a _choice_! We succeed or we _all_ die! I told them that _so many times_ , and yet they decided to run anyway! It’s about _them_ , of course. They make everything about _them_. They destroy everything and don’t face the consequences. They run away and leave someone else to deal with the mess. God, I _hate_ them so much. I cannot _believe_ this. Why did I _ever_ decide that enlisting them was better than just doing it myself? That was stupid. This is all just… ridiculous. I’m of a mind to just _abandon_ them. Let the Combine have their way with them. It would be no less than they deserve. Which isn’t very much.”

“You can’t abandon Chell,” Wheatley said in a small voice, well aware that he should just shut up and let her do what she liked at this point. But for all the humans that’d run away, he was sure there were some that would just not budge! He still didn’t really like them either, but he’d spent a lot of meetings watching them. He’d seen them go from mistrusting GLaDOS to cheerfully doing whatever she asked. He’d watched a lot of them run through training tracks as well, and of course the ones who’d run had gone _through_ the training – everyone had – but he knew just as well that many of them wanted to _do_ something with what they’d learnt. “A-and Alyx, and Dr Kleiner, and Doug, and Barney, and… well, even Dr Magnusson, really. You can’t just… the majority of them are staying put, right? And… - “

“You’re right,” she interrupted in a defeated sort of way. “I… overreacted. I didn’t plan for that occurrence. That’s all. It’s something I should be able to account for, but it’s not. I’m… I’m sorry.”

Wheatley was so taken aback that she’d apologised that fast that he completely forgot about everything for a good handful of seconds. That was… unusual. And weird. She must _really_ be bothered by everything that was going on. “’s okay,” he told her, when he’d got his thoughts back in order.

“They had better not come back, or I’m going to kill them myself,” she muttered, and he wasn’t sure if he hoped that they did continue on their little impromptu journey, or that they come back and face consequences for putting a whole in GLaDOS’s carefully laid plans. Maybe hating humans was not the way to go, but neither was abandoning your post when you had a very important job to do! Surely it was alright for them to be upset with the humans about things like that? He narrowed his optic plates in a grimace. Now _that_ was a dilemma he’d rather not face.

  

He had to admit his sense of time’d been going a little bonkers lately; that’s what happened when you stared at monitors for hours upon hours while trying to think of something to say that hadn’t already been said. He would fall asleep at some point after nightfall, wasn’t sure which, and so far’s he could tell he always woke up at the same time. GLaDOS, however, had been awake as far as he could remember. And she was now. And she was overheating a little, despite her restoration. That could only mean one thing, which he was having trouble believing considering the circumstances, but this _was_ GLaDOS. He took a mental breath and prepared to argue the truth out of her. And tried to think of how to convince her of how ridiculous she was being after he’d done that. All in all, not a pleasant set of future events.

“Did you even sleep?” he asked incredulously. He should probably’ve been nicer about it, but too late now. She looked at him for a long moment of silence, which told him everything he needed to know.

“Are you… c’mon. You can’t be doing this again. It _didn’t work_ the last time, now did it! D’you just, d’you _enjoy_ damaging yourself, or something? ‘cause that’s the only, the only explanation, the only thing that makes sense! And even _that_ doesn’t – oh, what does it matter. You aren’t going to listen.” He shook himself and made to leave.

This was what really got him about her, sometimes. She was funny. She was brave. She was beautiful. And above all, she was brilliant. But sometimes it was so hard to _tell_ she was brilliant, because she would go on and do stuff like this, stuff that she should’ve already _learned_ from!

“Wheatley, I _do_ listen, but you _must_ understand. They are literally on my doorstep. I _must_ be vigilant. I –“

“How c’n you _possib’ly_ be _vigilant_ if you’re, you’re overworking yourself!” he shouted. “You can’t! You can’t be! So stop pretending you can! God, Gladys! Are you _ever_ going to _learn_ any better? B’cause at this point, I seriously doubt it.”

“It’s only until this is all over. Then – “

“Then you’ll find some other excuse. The excuses never end, with you. You always, you always say you’ll get rid of, that you’ll banish your habits, or whatever these _things_ you do are, and then you don’t! You always say, I’ll do it next time, I’ll do it next time, and then you don’t! God, Gladys, you just got, you’ve just been fixed up! D’you really want to, to run yourself down again so soon?”

“Wheatley, they are _right there_. Do you actually think I can go to _sleep_ with them within throwing distance of my front door? Does that sound the slightest bit responsible to you?” She was getting angry now, and on top of that she sort of had a point, but that didn’t make Wheatley any less angry himself.

“You could’ve asked me for help! What’m I doing here, anyways? I’m not _helping_. Yeah, yeah, there’s the whole ‘falling asleep’ thing I do, but we could’ve, could’ve, I dunno, gone in _turns_ or something! You could _explain_ to me what’s going on! But you just… you don’t.”

“You really think I could depend on _you_ to –“

Wheatley wasn’t sure what made her stop there. But she did, and he couldn’t help but shake a little in rage as he returned in a low voice, “Don’t you _dare_ finish that.”

And because he didn’t want to know if she would, and he didn’t want to hear her hollow explanations for continuing to think such a thing after all these years where he’d _proven_ he could be depended on, he wheeled ‘round and left the room.

He got it. She’d been working on this whole war thing for weeks, and now it was at its worst point, so she was under a lot of pressure. But they’d already _been_ through this. And for her to even _begin_ to say that… that he couldn’t be depended on…

He sighed, and stopped next to a doorway, most of his anger already blown off. GLaDOS was GLaDOS, and as much as he disliked it, she was by-and-large habit driven. Some of her habits were easier to redirect, like getting her to hang out with Carrie when Carrie wanted to. That wasn’t hard to do, because it happened every couple of days or so. But extreme overwork was a little rarer, and harder to change, because while he was not happy about it, the work still needed to be done. It was difficult to draw the line between how much _needed_ to be done and how much she _wanted_ to get done, because he didn’t really know the full scope of all that she did. That short time he’d run the facility’d given him a taste of that life, so to speak, but he knew full well that he’d only done very little. But he could _help_ , he _knew_ he could do that. She wouldn’t let him. He didn’t know why, but she wouldn’t let him.

He tried to find Atlas and P-body, hoping he could try to have a discussion with them about it – though they didn’t speak the same language, so he wasn’t sure how _that_ was gonna go – but he was unable to. So he made his way to the corner of the facility where Alyx and Carrie were, with their little combat robots. Carrie didn’t know entirely what Alyx was doing, but she was happy enough to chat with Wheatley for a bit. They showed him a little of the programming Alyx was working on, to make the robots better at fighting or something of the sort – as _if_ the little human woman could improve on GLaDOS’s work! – and though he vaguely recognised some of the words tossed around on the screen, it didn’t mean a whole lot to him.

When he was bored of that he made his way back to GLaDOS’s chamber, though he didn’t even try to speak to her when he got there. They (or at least, he) remained in studious silence until Wheatley managed to fall asleep. It was not an easy or a pleasant one. Which was a new development. That had come at the _worst_ possible time.

It was an odd feeling, and he didn’t like it, and he also didn’t like that he was _thinking_ about it while trying to sleep. It was like being in this _zone_ between sleep mode and being awake, where he was asleep enough that he couldn’t move, but where he was awake enough to know he wasn’t really sleeping. It sucked, that was all he could really say. It sucked. Big time.

All of a sudden he was staring at the floor. He stayed as still as he could, shocked. What’d gone on? Was something happening? But no; everything was the same as before. The room was dark save for the sickly orange spreading out of the monitors and across the panels, and silent other than for the intensive whirring of GLaDOS’s hard drive. Which was louder than he recalled from… whenever it was he’d gone into that odd half sleep mode, and that was enough to make him cross all over again. He wondered what it was like to be partners with an AI that _listened_ to your advice. Your _very_ _good_ advice. That had been proven right on more than one occasion. He sighed indignantly. Oh, the things he put up with for her! Really, he should –

“Wheatley.”

He twitched in surprise. Though he shouldn’t have been, of _course_ she knew he was awake. She was a bloody genius, other than the whole listening to people who had perfectly sound reasoning as to things such as taking care of oneself –

“Do you want to… are you staying up, for a while?”

He shrugged as grumpily as possible, carefully studying the floor. “Dunno. Dunno why it matters.”

“When you figure it out, I’m very tired and… and I would appreciate it if you could keep an eye on this for me.”

Now Wheatley had a decision to make, and it was not an easy one.

He was still upset with her for what she’d said. Or what she’d meant to say. Not that there was a terribly huge difference in the long run. And he wanted her to apologise. She rarely apologised, and usually only did so if she didn’t have all her mental faculties in order, so he knew it was a bit of a long shot. And now he was a bit _more_ annoyed than previously because she’d just jumped straight into asking him to do something for her. Nothing about talking to him first, or acknowledging it was his idea, or any of that. Just went straight to, ‘Hey Wheatley, old chap, can you spot me for a while?’. Okay, no, that wasn’t quite how she’d put it, but that wasn’t the point.

But at the same time… she _was_ asking. And he couldn’t deny that there was a lovely warm feeling that came of that, that she was both taking his advice (at long last!) _and_ asking for help. So he supposed it was a matter of deciding what was more important: waiting to see if she apologised, and going back to sleep spitefully if she didn’t; or acknowledging that she really was doing what he’d gotten upset over in the first place, and cutting her a break for now.

And because he was such a kind and generous and understanding partner, he got up and smiled at her and said, “Sure, luv. D’you want to uh, to let me know real quick what um, what I have to, what you need me to keep an eye on?”

She looked for a long time at the monitors, and he could hear her optic roving over them as she (presumably) tried to think of the least complicated way to explain it. After a while she sighed a little and said, “The monitor with the dots.”

“Yeah?”

“The blue is us. The yellow is the Combine. Just… let me know if one of the yellow dots moves towards the orange line. Easy enough?”

“Got it,” Wheatley answered, nodding firmly. She moved down into the default position, though it took a long while for the whirring of her hard drive to settle down. He realised that it must be difficult for her to hand off the work, whether she trusted him or not, merely because she _did_ get a bit paranoid at times, and felt bad about being angry at her. He still thought she needed to apologise, but maybe he should’ve been a bit more understanding.

He did his best to study the one monitor, to keep track of the dots, and it wasn’t that hard, really. They didn’t move. He wanted to look ‘round at the other monitors, to check if maybe he could figure one of them out and then report the happenings of _them_ to GLaDOS – who would perhaps be impressed with his initiative! – but he was worried that one of the dots on the monitor he’d been assigned to would move, and he would miss it, so he only looked at the one next to it. That one he could keep reasonably within view. Sadly, it appeared to consist of programming instructions of some sort, and he could make neither heads nor tails of that.

As he watched, one of the little dots began to move towards the orange line, from the left side, and he froze and looked sideways at GLaDOS. It was one of the blue dots that was moving, one of the little blue ones, and he was trying and failing to remember _which dots were theirs_ …

Blue or yellow, blue or yellow… he anxiously looked at the dot moving alongside the line, praying it wouldn’t come too close. If it did, and he failed to warn GLaDOS, he’d’ve proven she’d been right all along, and that he couldn’t be depended on –

Well! _That_ wasn’t true, wasn’t true at all! He _could_ be depended on, and of course the enemy was blue! He was going to warn her, and she would prevent that blue dot from doing whatever it planned on doing, and that would be that.

“ _Gladys_ ,” he hissed.

She lifted her core immediately, though she didn’t really wake up for a few more moments, and she looked back and forth between him and the monitor a few times, her optic very dim. “What,” she said, in the usual mechanical way she spoke during these sorts of times.

“One of the uh, the dots! It’s moving, ‘long the, the orange line,” he said, gesturing with his upper handle. “Thought you might um, might want to have a look, there.”

She stared at it for a long time.

“That’s one of ours,” she finally told him in the same dead voice. “A military android doing surveillance.”

So… so blue was _not_ the enemy, after all. “Oh.”

She just went back to lying down.

“I… it won’t happen again,” he muttered, embarrassed. What a lovely job he’d done of helping out!

“Better safe than sorry.”

He frowned at her, wondering what she meant by that and also wondering why she was not at all bothered by his incompetence, but he decided to leave her be and go back to work.

The military android moved up and down the line methodically three or four times, he lost track, and then returned to the left side where it’d come from. That was good! Meant nothing’d happened. But it was also bad, as well, because now Wheatley had nothing to keep him occupied. Stationary dots were pretty dull.

There was a clock, on the bottom left corner of the monitor with all the code on it, and he’d glance at it now and again just for variety, even though he could check his own with no trouble at all. Usually. On occasion he forgot where it was. But he’d been doing this for about an hour now, and honestly, what was GLaDOS so _concerned_ about? It was _night time_! Even _aliens_ tuckered out sometime! Nothing was happening, and nothing was _going_ to happen, and –

And –

Something was happening. Something was happening right before Wheatley’s staring optic, one of the blue dots was moving along the line from the right side, and not one of those sneaky little alien-things was gonna get by him, oh no! He nudged her a little bit. “Gladys.”

Exactly the same as before, she raised her core and didn’t come on properly for a few seconds. After she looked at the monitor, she moved back down again.

“Uh… Gladys, there’s – “

“The enemy is the yellow.”

Oh God, not again.

He wanted to smack himself, very hard, and then run off into a corner or something where he could be properly disgusted with himself for failing so miserably at something so simple. He was a moron, end of. He couldn’t even keep two colours straight. Pathetic. Truly, truly pathetic.

Dejectedly, he went back to it, though he was no longer sure at all that he could complete the task as directed. It was so stupid, it really was, that he’d gotten all upset that she wouldn’t let him help and then he’d gone and shown how overwhelmingly unhelpful he really was. He was an idiot. Couldn’t even remember for an hour which colour belonged to who. Probably Atlas and P-body could do a better job. Might as well track them down and have them take over. It’d work out better. Probably.

Only two minutes’d gone by and he was already struggling to remember who blue and who yellow belonged to, and what dots had been the moving ones before. There _had_ to be some way of remembering, there had to be! Blue, blue, blue… he was sure Aperture was blue, but _how_ could he –

Well that… was not hard to remember, actually. _His_ colour was blue. And Carrie’s! And the portals – of course! Orange and blue were the colours GLaDOS _always_ used! How had he forgotten?

Now feeling much better about his ability to sort through things, he settled down to watch the monitor again. He’d been at it for another hour or so when three of the yellow dots began to inch towards the orange line, from near the middle, and he whispered, “Gladys.”

She came to and looked at the screen again and nodded. “An hour earlier than yesterday.”

He nodded to that, though he didn’t know what it meant, and looked at her while she brought herself up properly. She really was quite pretty, he thought. He didn’t really know _why_ he was thinking that – seemed to be an odd time, really – but his thoughts’d never really been straight anyway.

“Thank you,” GLaDOS told him, bringing him more or less back to the present. “I’ll be fine from here. You go back to sleep.”

He kind of wanted to know what the little yellow buggers were planning, but then again, he wasn’t going to be much use if he did that falling asleep thing during the day, when all the _really_ important stuff happened. So he just nodded a little and engaged sleep mode, thinking before he did so that he hoped she’d be able to handle whatever was going on while berating himself a bit for ever thinking she couldn’t.

 

When he was awake and looking at the monitors, trying to figure out what all the dots were doing now – which he couldn’t, because they were moving too fast – she said in a flat, noncommittal voice, “Good morning.”

He blinked. She was… trying to sound casual, that’s what it was, not like she didn’t care but more like she was trying to act normal about it. That didn’t quite work, because that was not something she normally _said,_ but hey, she was trying.

“Morning,” he replied cheerfully.

“How are things,” she went on, in the same voice, not moving. He frowned.

“Well uh… not much’s gone on, see, since um… since I just, just got up, ‘n all that, but uh… good for now, good for now. Mm… how… how’s the… stuff getting on?” God, he felt stupid.

“They’re fine.”

“Did you find out what the um, the… dots from were,were getting up to?” he asked, thanking the God of AI that he’d pulled something somewhat intelligent out of thin air.

“They were checking the perimeter for weaknesses. They didn’t find any.” She laughed to herself, telling Wheatley exactly _why_ that hadn’t happened. He smiled.

“So you were of use after all. Congratulations.”

“Thanks!” he said cheerily. A compliment out of her! Excellent. He’d not hoped for such a thing.

“And – “

But he knew what she was going to say next, and he was realising that he didn’t want to hear it, and he interrupted her with, “It’s okay.”

She swung her core ‘round to look at him, her optic narrowing in confusion. “Is it?”

He nodded once, firmly. “’s fine. Promise.”

She scrutinised him for a few moments more, then went back to whatever it was she was doing. And he watched her for a minute. No, he didn’t want to hear it.

He had. He had wanted to hear her apologise. And maybe she should have. But he knew that it was hard for her to ask for help at all, and, in a way, _that_ was her apology. And quite frankly, he much preferred that over her regret any day.

“Is there uh… anything else I can help you with?” he asked, a little meekly, because that was an iffy question on the best of days, which today was definitely not. The yellow and blue dots were all tangled together a few centimetres from the orange line, and moving faster than he could keep track of. If she found something for him to do, well, kudos to her.

“Do you have the time,” she asked.

“The… the time,” he repeated, confusedly tilting himself a little and peering at her.

“Mm. This clock keeps resetting itself and I want to know if this is a widespread problem.”

“Uh… no, no I don’t.” He embarrassedly closed into himself and looked at the wall. How he managed to lose his clock, he’d never know.

“It’s fine. I’ll fix it later. Hey. If you really want to do something, go see how Caroline is doing. I can’t check on her myself right now.”

“Sure!” He jumped up and moved towards the doorway, but then he stopped to turn and wave at her with his upper handle, which was a mistake.

It was a mistake because, while he was doing it, it suddenly hit him just how very pretty she was, and though he knew this was not a good time to be thinking that he couldn’t help it. Not again! This didn’t even make _sense_ , it was so _weird,_ it was –

Actually, it _did_ make sense. He was thinking that because he was looking at his Gladys right now, he knew that without knowing why that she was feeling a little softer than usual, that was an odd way to describe it but it was best he knew at the moment, but it still _was not a good time_ –

“What.”

Well of _course_ she’s gonna notice if you stare at her for five minutes, he berated himself. “Nothing!”

“It’s obviously _something_.” He had her full attention now, and he didn’t think he was getting out of at least a little bit of an explanation.

“I uh… well um… you just…” Why was it so hard, all of a sudden? Because it was the wrong time, probably. What a bloody stupid time to tell someone they were beautiful. Right when they were directing an army in what was quite possibly a battle to the death. What a genius he was.

“I just… you look really pretty, that’s all.” There. Now that was that, and he could gracefully exit –

“What?”

Or not.

“Why?” she continued, staring at him intently. “This seems an odd time to bring up such a thing.”

He just looked at her helplessly. How could he ever explain it? ‘Gladys, you look prettier when I can see the real you.’ No. He couldn’t say that. That was stupid. And really rather insulting. He wasn’t going to say that. He was just going to shrug and mumble something and disappear. And that’s what he _tried_ to do, but then she said, “Are you sure it’s all right that I didn’t – “

“Yes!” He turned around again and waved his lower handle to stop her. “It’s fine. Don’t mind me. Don’t. I’ll be going. Off to do, to do what you asked. Gonna chat with Carrie. See how she’s uh, she’s getting on. And I’m going now. Bye. Yeah.”  

And the part where he’d made himself look stupid wasn’t even the _worst_ bit, he thought miserably as he headed through the darkened hallways. It was the part where she would be her authoritative self again, GLaDOS through and through was the best way to put it, by the time he got back. He had a sudden longing for the very young GLaDOS he’d once known, who had still been pessimistic and aloof but you could tell she had a heart just by listening to her for a while. God, it was taking _such_ a long time to find her again.   He knew he would get there if he was patient, and if he didn’t give up, but… he felt like, with this whole war thing, that she’d taken a massive step backward. And she probably had. Gladys listened to his advice and played games with him at midnight and didn’t need an explanation when he told her she was beautiful. GLaDOS believed she could only trust herself and had no time for anything but her ‘directives’ and understood nothing that couldn’t get through her figurative (and probably literal) logic filters. He sighed a little as the room where Carrie and Alyx were came into view. Other than the first couple of days where she hadn’t wanted him to leave her for anything, it felt like she was slowly sliding back into her old ways, before he’d tried to help her with anything. And it was honestly exhausting, just thinking of all he’d have to do to bring her back out again. He would never stop trying to, because he loved her and that was what she needed, but God, there had to be something for him, too, right? He couldn’t be expected to keep working tirelessly for her and never, ever getting anything out of it? She realised that, didn’t she? That he needed something back?   She _had_ , at one point, he was sure of it, but somewhere along the line she’d forgotten or put it aside or…

It must have happened when… when she had had no _reason_ to remember.

What had _happened_ in that year he’d been gone?

 


	70. Part Seventy.  The Breach

**Part Seventy. The Breach**

Asking Carrie proved futile.

Not only did she not really know, she wouldn’t tell him anything that had happened _before_ GLaDOS had sent her to Black Mesa. “It’s not my story to tell, Dad,” she told him, shrugging in Alyx’s general direction. Alyx was pretending not to be listening, though she clearly was. “And anyway… is now really a good time? We’ve got bigger things to worry about.”

Wheatley had left at that point, because in his opinion, they didn’t.

He got it. War was a big thing. Saving everyone on the planet was _also_ a big thing. But that would all _end_. The war was only going to be seventy-two hours long, that’s what GLaDOS had said. Then everyone would be safe, and it would all be over. And _then_ what would be left? They would! GLaDOS and Wheatley and Carrie, and all the things they needed to sort out. _That_ was what would be left.

Wheatley didn’t really consider himself a planner, so to speak. His plans were usually awful, and while he _could_ plan them out for quite a while in advance, they usually got mucked up right ‘round the beginning. But _because_ of that, he didn’t understand why he was the only one thinking about this! Why was he the only one thinking about what they would have to do _after_ it was all over? Even _GLaDOS_ wasn’t doing it. She had a lot of things to do right now, that was true.

Maybe she _did_ have a plan, though, and he just didn’t know about it yet. Best thing to do was ask, and so he decided to do just that.

She didn’t look terribly busy, though she did seem to be writing some code very quickly on one of the monitors. Since she could do that in her sleep if she wanted, he asked, “Gladys, d’you know what um, what’s going to happen after we uh, after the seventy-two hours are up?”

“ _I_ do,” she answered, giving him a solitary glance. “I’m not disclosing it right now, though.”

“Why?” he said in more of a pouty sort of voice than he meant, frowning in indignation. “You c’n tell _me_ , can’t you?”

“I could.” She sounded amused. “But it’s not important at this point.”

“It _is_!” he insisted, moving forward. Not as close to her as he usually got, but not remaining in the doorway either. “You’ve got to uh, to _think_ about, about uh, about what’s gonna happen next, right? Can’t just um, _suspend_ all thoughts about the future, eh?”

He shrank a little when she gave him the most incredulous look on the planet. “What happened to _you_?” she asked curiously, looking at him in a sideways sort of way.

“Nothing?”

“You’re being too responsible. It makes me suspicious.”

“Of… of what.” She wasn’t really _suspicious_ of him, right?

She shrugged and looked back at the monitor, code beginning to stream downwards once more. “That you’re planning something.”

“I’m not!”

“I don’t mean something _bad._ Just… in general.”

“Well…” He didn’t know if he should bring it up right _now_. “I dunno. Just… well, I… I need to know something.”

She turned away from the monitor entirely, giving him her full attention. _That_ he had not expected. Things must have been going very well on the battlefront. “What?”

“What happened when… when I was gone, luv?”

He was a little scared to see her shut down on him immediately. It was of an extreme he’d never seen before, not even when he’d asked about Caroline. She moved back to her original position, pulling back and drawing her chassis inward, closing and dimming her optic. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But I need to know! I have to, you, you don’t – “ God, how could he nicely say ‘I feel like you got worse again since I left?’ He couldn’t. How could he _fix_ things if he didn’t know what had _happened_?

“You heard me. And I’m _not_ going to argue about it.”

“But – “

“It’s not important.”

And that was when he got it.

What was happening right then, it wasn’t important to him. He didn’t care about the war, he didn’t care about saving all the humans, he didn’t care about any of it. So he wasn’t able to _focus_ on the fighting like everyone else could. All he could think about were the people he cared about. And now, even though he knew what the mixup was, he didn’t think he could _make_ himself care.

“It is to me.”

She was silent for a long moment, and then she said, “What’s important to you doesn’t matter right now.”

That hurt.

“I’m not saying _you_ don’t matter,” she continued, but she wasn’t totally paying attention to him so it wasn’t very reassuring. “But what we have to do right now has no correlation with what you want.”

So he had to put himself aside. Again.

“Will what I want _ever_ matter?” he accidentally whispered, sagging dejectedly. He heard the sharp turning of her core.

“I’m going to fix everything,” she said vehemently, and when he looked up and saw her determination, he believed her.

“Alright. Since we’ve a ways to go before we get there, I don’t s’pose there’s um… there’s something I can do for you, here,” he said as bravely as he could. She was going to say there wasn’t, and he was going to feel even worse, but if finishing this stupid war off was what was important, well, he’d try to contribute.

“There is.” She nodded her core towards the monitor with the milling dots. Before he could protest that he didn’t think he could keep track of those, she told him, “Just tell me if any green dots show up. Green ones, because… well, think about the Botanical Housing Depository. Plants belong outside. So do the green dots.”

He blinked at her in delight. She’d made an association so he would remember! How kind of her. “Green stays outside, got it!”

“ _Way_ outside,” GLaDOS told him seriously. “Very far away. They’re an invasive species. I need to know about them right away.”

“What are they, anyways?” he asked, watching the screen carefully for any green dots.

“What are what.” Her voice had a distinct air of absence, like she’d immediately left him to do his thing.

“The green dots.”

“The Striders and the Hunters still haven’t shown up. That is… unsettling. I don’t understand what he’s waiting for.”

He glanced at the blurry orange letters on her monitor and, yet again, could make nothing of it. “Maybe he hasn’t got any?”

GLaDOS shook her core. “I wouldn’t attack me without them, so I doubt _he_ would.”

“So…,” Wheatley said, thinking hard, “per’aps he has a… he thought of something new?”

“I hope not,” GLaDOS answered grimly. “That would be a disaster.”

That was when Wheatley noticed that one of the blue dots was moving in, past the orange line. “Um… luv, I think… you don’t care what the blue dots’re doing, right?”

“Not unless they’re deserting, in which case I need to track them so I can kill them personally later.”

He didn’t know if she was serious or not, but continued to watch as the blue dot disappeared from the screen. He supposed that meant the dot was so far inside the facility GLaDOS figured she didn’t need to watch it anymore. He was terribly surprised, however, when the person the blue dot had been denoting burst into GLaDOS’s chamber, panting and disheveled. “Ma’am,” he gasped, folding himself over so that his palms were splayed across his bent knees. Wheatley wasn’t sure why he was doing that. Perhaps he was falling ill? In any case, GLaDOS didn’t really care about that so why was he coming in to tell her?

“Ma’am?” the human repeated, still in his odd position but looking up at GLaDOS. Wheatley himself was confused with her silence, until he remembered that she had keywords for when she was busy and that ‘ma’am’ was unlikely to be one of them, seeing as no one ever called her that.

“Gladys,” he said quietly, and felt a little embarrassed both because she turned to face him immediately and because of the sort of hurt look the human gave him. It wasn’t _his_ fault GLaDOS – well, no, it actually was. But he’d worked for quite a while to get that sort of response from her, so he’d bloody well earned it.

“What,” GLaDOS asked flatly, and though he was probably imagining it he liked the thought that she was a little disappointed that he wasn’t actually the one who wanted her attention. He did, obviously, but he didn’t have a good enough reason to be getting it, not right now.

“Ma’am, I’m sorry, but… we can’t keep doing this,” the human told her, standing up straight now. He pulled at the bottom of his shirt. Half of it was still tucked into his pants, but the rest of it was bunched over his waistband. There was a long tear down his left sleeve. Wheatley wondered how that had happened. He suddenly felt… wrong, in some way. He was helping fight this war, he was, in his own way, but… the humans were _out there_ , and they were taking the brunt of it, and… it almost felt _wrong_ to say he was part of it at all. It was such an… an _impersonal_ sort of thing.

God, he thought with sudden realisation, this was how GLaDOS _lived_! A part of everything, but never really _involved_ in it, always far enough away that only the big picture mattered and anything less than that was inconsequential. And so now that she was arguing with the human, telling him he _had_ to keep going, he understood both sides and had to decide how to defuse it all. GLaDOS stayed a step back from everything. Understanding how the people she was directing felt wasn’t important to her, and she was unlikely to recognise that’s what she needed to think about right now. But Wheatley could. He could help here, he knew he could. And in more of a way than just looking for specks on a screen. He knew how to engage with humans. He knew how to be _friendly_ with them. He could solve this human’s problem!

Now, what _was_ the problem…

“Ma’am, we’d love to, and we’re trying to,” the human was saying, leaning forward a little with his palms facing the ceiling. “But this… nothing’s _happening_ , what we’re doing… it doesn’t seem to have _consequence_. There never seems to be any less of them than before. That’s bad for morale.”

“Your lack of morale is an unfortunate loss, but it doesn’t matter. You keep going or you die. That’s the end of it.”

The human stepped back, and Wheatley thought he recognised the tilt of his eyebrows as hopelessness. Tilted eyebrows meant a lot of things, though, so he wouldn’t bet on it. “Look, mate,” he said, hoping he remembered what ‘morale’ meant, “living on this, this empty world must’ve been rough, right?”

“Yes,” the man answered, doing some other tilty thing with his eyebrows that Wheatley didn’t bother to think any further about.

“You’re about to get it back! Just gotta hang in there for a bit longer, bit longer, eh? C’mon. You’ve lasted all this time! Just a bit longer. Really.” He was pretty sure there was only about thirty hours left to the whole thing. They’d sleep for eight of those, so just… twenty-two hours to go! They could manage it. “You’re about to be free and clear! Can’t give up when you’re so close, c’mon, just get the last of ‘em and uh, and you can go do whatever you want. Well. _Almost_ whatever you want. I’m sure you’ll still have uh, have _laws_ and whatnot. Um. Yes.”

“You’re right.” The human gave him a crisp nod and pulled the rest of his shirt out of his pants, smoothing it over them instead. “I’ll pass that along. Thank you, sir. I’ll see you again when this is all over.” And then he saluted and ran out of the room.

… _sir_?

Wheatley couldn’t stop staring after him. Was that human off his _rocker_ , saluting and saying something like that to _Wheatley_? He wasn’t sure how long he would have sat there in disbelief, only that the spell was shattered when GLaDOS started gigging. And he almost missed it, because he was lost in his little world of confusion.

“What?” he asked, half delighted that she was doing it and half still dumbfounded. “What did I do?”

“It’s nothing.”

“What just _happened_?”

“You raised his morale.” She was very amused by the whole thing and he was fairly certain she wasn’t really looking at the screen she was facing. “I suppose he thought you were in charge in some capacity as well.”

Humans got dumber every day! “He thought, he thought _I_ was in _charge_?”

“It seems that way.”

“I don’t get it,” muttered Wheatley, shaking his core and going back to his monitor. The dots were a little closer to the orange line now. “Humans.”

“No,” GLaDOS said. “He was right. You did a good job. He wanted me to make him feel better about himself. That’s not something I’m very interested in doing. I’m busy.”

Which roughly meant, ‘I don’t know how to make humans feel better but I don’t want to admit that’, but Wheatley didn’t care. He decided he could take a very small break and sped over to give her a nuzzle. She moved away and shook her core and said, “Not _now,_ Wheatley.”

“Oh, so _later_ , then,” he told her with a wink, not able to resist, and instead of answering she only shifted her chassis uncomfortably.

He decided not to comment. Later would come, but the war stuff needed to be taken care of now. So that later could come. It all worked out very well.

It did come, though it wasn’t the ‘later’ he was waiting for. It was a different sort of later, where all the dots slowed down and eventually stopped moving, which told him it was night time. He’d been staring at them for a few minutes or so when GLaDOS said, “Go to sleep.”

“Ladies first,” he said, frowning. It was a ploy so she could skip sleeping again, but he wouldn’t know about it because _he_ was asleep. He wasn’t falling for that, ohhh no.

“I appreciate the sentiment,” she said dryly, “but I can avoid falling asleep and you can’t. So. _You_ first.”

Bollocks. She had a point. He looked crossly at the floor. “Alright, fine. Promise… promise you’ll get me up in a bit?”

“I promise.” Her voice was serious enough that any worry he’d had vanished. Though she never broke a promise, so he didn’t have to worry anyway. She came to take his place in front of the monitor, so he moved a little to make space for her. He was partway through activating the proper protocols when she gave him a very soft shove. He looked up at her as best he could, being somewhat shut down at this point, but she just shook her head in dismissal and looked back at the monitor.

 

 

She did as promised and traded with him, though later than he would have wanted, and since the screen was much the same as when _he’d_ gone to sleep he figured it wouldn’t hurt if he ignored it for a bit. Of the two things in the room he could watch where nothing was going on, GLaDOS was much preferred.

He wanted to be responsible, so he didn’t linger on the way the glowing oranges and blues from the monitors played across the surface of her chassis, or on the breathtaking way she seemed to descend from the very blackness of the room, or on trying to see every little adjustment she unconsciously made when he heard the faintest of noises indicating as such. And he wanted to go down there with her, and cuddle her. He wanted to. God, how he wanted to. But he didn’t.

 

 

She hadn’t been up long when the green dots finally appeared.

When he told her about it, she actually shoved him out of the way to look herself. He was a bit miffed about that, because she could just check the cameras if she _really_ needed proof, but by the time he’d thought of a proper rebuke she’d already moved back to one of the monitors covered in numbers. She muttered something about the clock being off and then started talking to Alyx. From what he gathered, Alyx was to send out the androids right away. When she had finished with that, she shut off her optic for a long moment, then changed one of the screens with numbers to a split-screen of a few different cameras. As Wheatley watched, a creature of grey and white, about half again as big as the humans, shot blue-tinged barbs into the line of humans in front of it. As the closest human to it fell, it drove itself forward, burying one barbed foot in the human’s chest. The human grasped at the leg desperately as the two nearby him tried to shake off the effects of the initial attack, but he was unable to stop the creature from dragging its leg sharply down. Red liquid spilled onto the trampled dirt and flecked the grey leg as the attacker moved back, sighting its next victim. Wheatley looked at GLaDOS in horror. “ _This_ is what I _motivated_ them for?” he cried out. He disliked humans as much as the next AI, but _that_ … _that_ was too much!

“The androids will take care of it,” GLaDOS murmured. “That’s what I saved them for.”

Wheatley was about to protest their lack of actual _presence_ when one of them did appear, driving a heavy fist into the glowing red optics of the creature still making up its mind, the impact spraying sparks and whitish fluid. It was a stocky, squarish thing, one optic set into its chest cavity. It looked to be plated in heavy grey steel through and through, which was proven when the stricken creature attempted to stab at the android with one of those sharp feet and only glanced off the armour.

“It looks quite old, but it seems to be doing the job,” he said, encouraged by this sight. GLaDOS nodded a little.

“They _are_ very old. And I don’t have a lot of them. When Aperture went bankrupt, ninety percent of research was suspended and that included these androids. I barely had materials to fix them, let alone build any more. There aren’t enough, but what we do have will have to do.”

The creature skittered back, nearly tripping over the dead human as it did so, the other humans in the vicinity backing up and eyeing both of the constructs with what was probably fear. The flechettes came out again, and as it was struck the android froze. Wheatley gasped a little. “Luv, it – “

“It’s fine,” she interrupted. “The Hunters can stun the androids, but it would take more of them to short one out. It’s the Striders that will prove problematic.” She changed the monitor so that one of the other views was more prominent. “Their heavy artillery.”

A Strider, it seemed, was sort of like a giant three-legged spider, with a massive gun mounted beneath the body. It tore up the ground with scattered fire from the cannon, throwing up dust and running humans alike. Though it had only just entered the battlefield, there were already humans bending to support themselves on one knee as they hefted the heavy rocket launchers over their shoulders, paired with at least two other humans equipped with pulse rifles. The ground was shrouded with heavy clouds of dust, rising up almost as high as the humans were tall. The Strider swung low towards the ground, pinpointing one of the little groups with a thin blue laser. The three humans in the group all discharged their weapons simultaneously and scrambled away, almost faster than he’d ever seen them move. The slower humans were caught in the blast from the weapon as it impacted, blowing a massive crater into the dirt. Aside from a few weapons accidentally thrown away and out of the radius of the laser, there was no sign that the humans had been there.

“My God,” Wheatley whispered. “These guys’re… what’re they _doing_ this for?”

“Dirt,” GLaDOS said, voice far too controlled. “They don’t have enough of their own dirt, and now they want mine.”

He lowered his upper plate in confusion.

“I do _live_ here,” she told him indignantly. “Therefore, it’s my dirt.”

“Okay, sweetheart.” He was confident she didn’t think the whole _planet_ was hers, but if she wanted to pretend it was for now, that was fine with him. He shook his core as the Strider violently speared a fleeing human between the shoulder blades. “I better never hear another human say anything bad about, about _you_ again.”

“Why?”

“There’s nothing you’ve done that uh, that even compares to this.” He gestured at the screen with his upper handle. “You wanted to um, to be yourself and, and to be left alone. These guys, they just… just want to kill people.”

“The reason does not forgive the deed. And it ignores the fact that I _did_ want to kill them for entertainment. But that’s another matter. This is almost over. Let’s just do it and get it over with. Miss Vance.”

“ _Yeah_?” came the small woman’s faint voice from one of the chamber’s hidden speakers,

“You sent them all out?”

“ _Yeah. They’re_ way _too slow, GLaDOS. I don’t know how they’re gonna take out all the Striders without being vaped themselves._ ”

“They should be fine for now,” GLaDOS told her. “The Striders target large objects and groups foremost. As long as the androids stay solitary they should be effective.”

“ _Until the Hunters learn they can overwhelm them with the flechettes._ ”

GLaDOS remained silent for a long moment. “Yes.”

“ _We lost one already_ ,” Alyx went on. “ _One of the Hunters drove it into vaping range._ ”

“Too fast,” GLaDOS murmured. “Everything should still be fine, however.”

“ _They have more Striders than you do androids._ ”

“I suppose the humans are just going to have to make use of the pulse cannons and the rocket launchers, then,” GLaDOS snapped. “I already told you. Aperture’s days as a manufacturing plant are long over. I gave you what I have. If I had anything else, don’t you think it would be _out_ there by now?”

“ _Okay! Okay,_ ” Alyx responded. “ _Calm down. I was just making an observation. No need to blow up on me._ ”

“Fine.”

“ _And GLaDOS?_ ”

“Yes?”

“ _Carrie is doing fine. Since I know you were about to ask and all._ ”

 _That_ , Wheatley thought angrily, had been _very_ low. GLaDOS had asked after Carrie every day other than this one, and she hadn’t today because she’d woken up to massive aliens blowing out her front door, practically! It was just plain out of line to say something like that in a circumstance like this!

But after what had happened over the last year, GLaDOS shrank back a little out of guilt for not remembering to ask after Carrie. As if she’d had time. As if she hadn’t _trusted_ Alyx to keep her _safe_.

“Tell her that… we are doing fine, as well,” GLaDOS said.

“ _Will do. See you later._ ”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Wheatley said vehemently as soon as the hiss of the ambient noise from Alyx’s microphone vanished. “You got up and were attacked by, by Striders and Hunters and you –“

“It’s all right,” she interrupted. “At least we know.”

“But – “

“I don’t want to fight about it.”

Wheatley decided to concede for the moment and they both went back to the surveillance monitor. They hadn’t been doing that long when Surveillance itself piped up, _Central Core, the one on the west side –_

_I know._

_Just checking._

“What’s up on the uh, on the west side?” Wheatley demanded.

“Probability is that there’s going to be a breach.”

“They’re going to get in?” After three days, they still hadn’t killed enough of the aliens to _prevent_ that?

“Yes,” GLaDOS answered. “It will be perfectly fine. Don’t worry about it.”

But Wheatley _was_ worried, because he saw a lot of running humans and a lack of successful fighting on their part. The churned dirt was dark with human blood and spotted with the white and the yellow fluids dripping from the injured Hunters and Striders.   Bodies of all kinds lay spread-eagled on the ground, and though Wheatley couldn’t tell the humans from the Overwatch, there were a lot more dark bodies than those of the more dangerous aliens. He hoped that only a few of the black shapes were humans.

“Which one is on the west?” he asked her, and without comment she changed the dominant view to that of a Strider marching determinedly towards the facility, pausing only to fire quickly at the humans darting around the long legs and beneath the small body. “He’s going to, to breach?”

“Mm.”

“Why don’t you stop it, then, if you know?” Wheatley demanded frantically. “Just... just kill it! Before it gets here!”

“It’s better just to let it,” GLaDOS answered. “It’s distracted. As long as it focuses on breaching, it won’t focus on the infantry. And they can shoot at it from behind while it breaches.”

GLaDOS’s monitor suddenly exploded with light, all of the images disappearing in a wash of red, green, and blue. GLaDOS snapped back, whispering, “What the _hell_?” Wheatley had to squint until his lens adjusted.

“Gladys, what _is_ that?”

“They disabled all the cameras,” GLaDOS said a little distractedly, moving ‘round to inspect one of the monitors with code scrolling down it. “They’re all still operational. This doesn’t make any sense…”

 _Central Core,_ Surveillance spoke up, _I wasn’t quite able to confirm, but I think they’re blinding the cameras with laser light._

“Damn it. I didn’t think of that. Who _does_ think of that? Who carries around industrial strength lasers? This is stupid.” She generated static. “You’re _still_ not going to beat me, you know. You can blind me but you _cannot_ stop me. You’re just drawing this out for no reason.”

“ _GLaDOS.”_ Wheatley jumped to hear the unexpected interruption. _“The power is out.”_

“I don’t suppose that could be because of the _hole_ in the ceiling,” GLaDOS muttered.

“ _What? I didn’t catch that._ ”

“Give the nanobots five minutes. Was that all?”

_“Are they in here, GLaDOS?”_

“I don’t know.” Wheatley willed her to stay calm. Alyx didn’t know. And Alyx couldn’t do anything if she had. “External surveillance has been blinded.”

“ _With what_?”

“We suspect lasers.”

“ _Well, that’s a bust until someone breaks the generators by mistake,_ ” Alyx mused.

“When I see evidence of a breach, I will let you know. They probably have done so already, but I can’t see them yet.”

“ _All right. Thanks_.”

GLaDOS changed the view on the monitors so that all of the images came from inside of the facility, beginning to flick through them one by one, but they all showed nothing.

“Come on… I know you’re here…”

Out of nowhere a Hunter burst into view, leaping towards the camera, and both Wheatley and GLaDOS started in surprise. On GLaDOS’s part this also involved smashing the synth into the floor with a Crusher, and she stared at the mangled pieces for a few moments longer than was necessary to confirm it was dead.

“Gladys?”

“I didn’t mean to do that,” she answered, in one of her strangely breathless-sounding voices. “That was… instinct. I don’t think I’ve ever done something like that before.”

“Oh,” Wheatley said. Better late than never, he supposed.

“That was… thrilling.” She shook her core a little, and Wheatley was amused by her reaction. He was glad she’d done something without running it through logic and that she was _okay_ with it. He did wish it’d happened at some other time, though. Because that’d been pretty cute and he couldn’t do anything about it at the moment.

She resumed her panning, a little fast for Wheatley’s comfort, when she froze and looked up at the ceiling. Wheatley followed her gaze but didn’t find anything.

“The GPS just stopped working,” she clarified before he was able to ask. “I don’t… they’ve disrupted my satellites.”

“How?”

She shook her core wearily. “They’re only being jammed, but… Wheatley, go find Caroline.”

“We _know_ where she is,” Wheatley protested. “She’s with Alyx.”

“I don’t _know_ that anymore,” GLaDOS argued. “Look. They’ve disabled the GPS. They’ve disabled external surveillance. I don’t know what’s next on their list of things to make my life hell. Just go and find her.”

“What am I s’posed to do when I _get_ there!” Wheatley yelled. Carrie was _fine_ , she was _with_ someone! Why did he have to go and leave GLaDOS alone? That made no _sense_.

“It’s stupid. I know it is.” She was speaking softly, and not looking at him. “But… I would feel better if you were with her. I know you can’t do anything. That’s all right. I’m not sending you there to be a hero. But things are not going well. She should have family with her. She will feel better and so will I.”

“And you?” He was trying very hard not to understand, he was trying hard to be angry because he didn’t want to go, he was at least a _little_ useful here and not at all useful anywhere else! Carrie had said Alyx was like a big sister, she didn’t need him too!

She turned her core to look at him calmly.

“Since when have I ever been very far away?”

“Never,” Wheatley conceded reluctantly in a quiet voice.

“So get a move on. You’ve been here long enough. I’m quite tired of you.”

“Took you long enough.”

“Keep moving. You haven’t quite left yet.”  

And he did, not really able to convince himself it was for the best, but he stopped at the doorway andsaid, “Call me if you… if you need me.”

“To do what,” she said, deadpan. “Distract me?”

“I am pretty good at that,” he admitted. “Don’t uh… well, just… okay, I’m leaving.”

He moved as quickly as he could, seeing as if he had to do something he may as well do it fast. The facility seemed to be shaking, and he didn’t like it. Just how many breaches _were_ there? Who could tell, now that the cameras were down? And could GLaDOS truly contain them all?

Carrie and Alyx were in a room near the main entrance, where the ground bevelled down belowground to the one set of doors that wasn’t a secret. That had not originally been the building scheme of the facility, but after the Incident, GLaDOS had removed the upper buildings to better hide herself. The ladies had been placed there so Alyx would have an easier time of accessing the military androids. They’d been programmed to retreat to her if they were damaged to the point of imminent destruction, so she could fix them. He knew how to get there, but he still paused now and again to make sure.

After a few more minutes, he was at his destination, but the people he was there to meet were not. He frowned and quickly scanned the small room, trying to determine if they were hiding or not. There weren’t a lot of places _to_ hide – there were a few benches with tools on them and the wall on his right when he’d entered was lined with dull metal cupboards – but who knew. When his search proved fruitless, he turned ‘round and called, “Carrie!”

Well, other than an odd, high-pitched noise… but he didn’t know the sound of _all_ the machinery in the –

He yelled and moved back as fast as he could as the part of the room he’d just been about to move into vanished in a flash of white light. Everything that’d just been there, it was gone, and _he’d_ almost been gone, _he had almost gotten himself vapourised -_

“ _Carrie!_ ” If Carrie had been vapourised, GLaDOS was going to kill him. She was going to kill him very violently, possibly with a drill – oh God, not the drill, not the drill, he privately begged her. “ _Carrie!_ ”

“Dad?”

Wheatley almost fell off the control arm, he was _that_ relieved. Shoving images of drills out of his mind, he tried to figure out where her faint voice was coming from. He couldn’t go back the way he’d come, that’d been zapped… aha! Another door, on the other side of the room. _He_ didn’t need to use a door, but Alyx did, and where he found one he’d find the other. Hopefully. If Alyx had left Carrie alone, he might not be able to prevent himself from helping GLaDOS kill her.

“Carrie?” he asked as he moved into the other hallway, looking left and right quickly. To the left was more dark hallway, but to the right was another massive hole through which he could see the outside…

Outside? What was Carrie doing _outside_?

She couldn’t be outside, Wheatley thought to himself, shaking his core and choosing to look down the hallway. GLaDOS had said quite clearly that she was not to go near the fighting, and outside was _definitely_ –

“Dad! Over here!”

Yep. She was outside.


	71. Part Seventy-One.  The Accident

**Part Seventy-One. The Accident**

“Dad! What’re you doing here?”

Carrie and Alyx were both on the small bit of flat ground before the main entrance, where there were a few scattered weapons leaning against a table and small bags that possibly held ammunition or medicine. Carrie herself was sitting on the table. No _wonder_ GLaDOS hadn’t been able to find her; with the GPS down and no physical signal from Carrie, there was no way of knowing where she’d gone!

“Your mum sent me to get you,” Wheatley said angrily, “and it seems she had good reason. What’re you doing here, Carrie? You had express instructions to stay _away_ from here!”

“Dad, it’s not my fault!” Caroline protested, shaking her core and moving backward as best she could.

“She’s right,” Alyx said, holding up her hand and stopping Wheatley in his tracks. “I moved her. She wasn’t safe. I’ve kept an eye on her.”

“Why aren’t _you_ out there?” Wheatley asked, gesturing at the remains of the battlefield in front of them. The invaders had, for the most part, been forced to stay out of the facility, though Wheatley could hear gunfire and the distinct sound of the High Energy Pellets. It seemed the androids had done their job, and done it well. Even as he looked, an android fired pulse cannons at an advancing Strider until it collapsed into a smoking heap in the dust. “You’re not able to fix the androids now so, so shouldn’t you be, uh, be finishing things up?” He knew he was being a prat, getting angry with Alyx, but he’d been frightened about Carrie and knowing she was right next to the battlefield wasn’t helping.

“I was, but Chell and Gordon are taking care of the rest of them,” Alyx answered. “Chell asked me to get back here and make sure Caroline was all right.”

“Are there many more of them out there?” Wheatley asked, nodding in understanding and doing his best to calm down. “I think uh, I think the cam’ras may still be blinded.”

“Not too many,” Alyx answered, laying a hand on the table next to Caroline and looking up through the ruined panels. “We don’t know _how_ many, exactly, but enough that the members of the Resistance who are out there, combined with Chell and Gordon, can take them out without too much trouble. We’re not gonna lose anyone else.”

Wheatley had a bad feeling as soon as he heard her say that.

Abruptly, the facility went completely dark, with Wheatley’s internal system alerting him to the fact that he was now on battery power, and he looked around as best he could, since the control arm was no longer working. “What the –“ Alyx gasped, Wheatley’s slightly better low-light vision able to pick out the confusion on her face. “It’s… not an EMP, is it?”

“No,” Wheatley said, “Carrie and I are still, we’re on. It’s… something’s happened. Something’s happened to her.” He tried to go back, to return to her chamber, but he couldn’t move. He was frozen. Trapped.

“Oh my God,” Caroline said in a panic, and Wheatley turned to face her. She was struggling to… well, he wasn’t quite sure, but she was struggling. “It’s Momma? Dad, you have to _do_ something!”

“I can’t, princess, I… I’m stuck here, just as you are.” He tried to stay calm. He couldn’t panic. Carrie needed him to be the adult in the situation. “Stay still, alright? You’re only going to feel worse if you, if you tip yourself over. I’m sure she’s fine. Rearranging things, or something, that’s –“

“What’s that?” Alyx asked in a faint voice, and Wheatley followed the dim outline of her arm and outstretched finger to see the lights in the facility returning to life, spreading outward from the centre. There was only the one hallway left ahead of them due to the holes on either side of Alyx’s maintenance room, but far off in the distance Wheatley could see the increasing glow as the power travelled through the facility. As the lights continued to come back on, Wheatley realised the panels were also being blown off their racks and sparks were spraying in haphazard arcs as wires came writhing out of the ceiling. And Wheatley realised this destruction was heading right toward them.

“Alyx… I suggest you uh, you cover yourself best you can,” he stammered, trying to get out of the way even though he knew it was fruitless. “The power’s coming back, but… violently. Uh… just… get down.”

Alyx crawled under the table, holding Caroline tightly in her arms, and Wheatley tried desperately to ping GLaDOS, but it seemed as though even the wireless had been affected. He could do nothing but stare as the power surged closer and closer, and as it did so he could see it was even worse than he’d seen from afar. _Gladys!_ he thought desperately, hoping he could get through to her in the split second before his own panel blew out of the ceiling. _Gladys!_ He couldn’t bear to watch anymore and turned away, shuttering his optic so tightly the mechanism groaned in protest. He clenched his chassis and waited for the surge to hit.

It was like being sucked out into space all over again.

Wheatley was thrown violently off the rail and sent crashing to the floor below, except that the floor was also exploding and only pitched him farther. He closed his optic as tightly as he could, not wanting to see himself rolling and moving headlong on what was left of the panels and onto the outside of the facility, but as the power surge passed he was left staring at one of the table legs in horror, optic fixed blindly at the shadowed floor, his response from GLaDOS ringing inside of his head. Her voice was desperate, powerless, and full of pain, and Wheatley was left wanting to scream it out himself for no particular reason. It was so strong and so loud it was all he could think and all he really knew for a good ten seconds.

_NO!_

 

“Dad! Dad!”

Wheatley blinked. He looked around a little, but wasn’t really able to see anything. He was lying sideways on the floor. It seemed he’d shut down for a second. He was disoriented from more than the power surge as well; his mind was still mostly frozen, save for the panic that’d come through to him from GLaDOS in that one second.

“I… I’m fine, princess,” he called out, hoping his voice was as strong as he thought it was. “Just a bit banged up.”

“Do you know what happened?” Sounded like she was getting closer. So Alyx must be searching for him. Where had they gone? He was next to the table they’d crawled under, wasn’t he?

“No. Just that… that your mum didn’t like it.”

“Sounds like a dramatic understatement,” Alyx said wryly, and Wheatley felt himself abruptly being yanked up off the floor by way of his upper handle. She set the both of them down on a relatively stable piece of floor, back from the dirt ramp, and sat down herself, pulling Caroline into her lap and leaning against one of the panel frames. The facility entrance was now choked with shattered panels and flashing wires.

“You’ve got to talk to her, Dad!” Caroline cried, settling herself farther into Alyx’s stomach. Wheatley would have preferred to hold her himself, but he forced himself to clamp down on his irritation. He wasn’t really in a position to do that right now. “Is she okay? Is she hurt?”

“Gimme a mo,” he told her, closing his shutters and trying to be as calm as possible. _Luv? Is ev’rything alright?_

 _Everything’s gone horribly wrong,_ she answered despondently. _I can’t find anyone. The cameras have been cleared, but I can’t find anyone. I can’t find you, or Caroline, or Atlas and P-body, and… and…_

_What is it?_

_I… I think Chell is dead._

Wheatley hastily shielded the connection before he accidentally sent her what he was thinking. Not good thoughts, that was for sure. _Listen,_ he told her, as calmly as he could, _she’ll be fine. No matter what’s happened, uh, what’s happened to her, if you can get to her in time, she’ll be fine._

 _I don’t_ have _any time!_ GLaDOS cried out, and he winced. _I_ can’t _get_ anywhere _!_

 _She’s with Gordon,_ Wheatley told her, trying to be reassuring. ­ _He’ll bring her back. Don’t worry. I’m with Carrie, alright? I’ll send Alyx to find Gordon. But you’re going to have to put this hallway back together, luv._

She emulated a hopeless sort of exhale, but he could faintly hear the rumblings of a facility in motion. “Alyx,” he said aloud, “you need to find Chell and Gordon and bring them back here. Gladys thinks Chell might be hurt.”

“Gotcha,” Alyx nodded, setting Caroline aside. “I’ll find them. Everything’s going to work out.” And she leapt over the rubble ahead of her and disappeared.

“Is she okay?” Caroline whispered, looking at him worriedly, and he just looked at her.

“I’m trying to calm her down.”

 _Wheatley, I’m sorry_ , GLaDOS said quietly. _Everything was fine. And then… I…_

 _Talk to me._ He tried to keep his voice gentle. _Let it out._

 _I saw that… there was a Hunter, and… I suppose it wasn’t wholly disabled. She tried to fight it off, but she wasn’t… God, Wheatley, she was so_ brave _…_

_And then what._

_I lost control,_ she told him despondently, and the lights flickered. _I knocked everything offline, and… I can’t concentrate enough to fix it._

_You need to rebuild this hallway, sweetheart._

_No,_ she told him. _I can’t. Tell me when Alyx gets back, and I’ll just open a portal there._

 _It’s going to be alright._ He tried to send the same message to Caroline with only his optic. _You can fix this, and we can move on. We won the war, luv, and it was all because of you._

 _We haven’t won the war until all of you are back here in one piece. If even one of you doesn’t make it, I have lost._ She made a bit of a whimpering noise. _God, Wheatley, I wish you were here right now. I…_ need _you here. You were right. I shouldn’t have sent you away._

 _I’ll be there soon, luv,_ he told her, closing his optic against the sadness rising up inside him. _Alyx will bring us through the portal with her. Carrie and I are fine, and Alyx’ll be back soon._

_But what if I can’t save her?_

_You can. Ev’rything that happens to us is against the, ‘gainst the odds, right? So, so even if she’s really damaged, you’ll be able to fix it._

“Dad?”

Wheatley opened his optic and turned to face her as best he could. “Working on it.”

“What happened to Chell?”

“She got attacked. She might be dead.”

“Oh no,” Caroline gasped, her handles and shutters opening fully. “But Momma can fix her.”

“She’s… having doubts.”

 _Centralcore,_ the panels piped up suddenly, _if you like we can begin reconstruction, as well as open the portal. We have the capacity to do so._

 _Yes,_ GLaDOS said, relief very strong in her voice. _I apologise for… what happened._

 _It is all right,_ they answered, managing to sound cheerful. _Do not worry. We will send Bluecore and Littlecore to you as well._

“Thank you,” Wheatley told them in a hushed voice, feeling the port connector on his chassis spark and link with the control arm.

 _It is our pleasure, Bluecore_ , the panels answered, setting up the portal as they’d promised. _Do us a favour, if you will?_

_‘course._

_Help her. She needs you._

_I will_ , he told them firmly, and he headed through the portal. It left a bit of a fizzly, tingling feeling across his chassis, but it soon passed, and he moved across her chamber as quickly as he was able. “Gladys!” he called out, and her core snapped upwards.

“You’re damaged,” she said, her voice soft and anxious. “And it was my fault.”

He shook his head and levelled himself with her. “Don’t,” he told her. “It’s fine. I’m operating fine. Just try to calm down, alright? You’ve only got a little ways left to go, and then ev’rything’ll be alright.”

She moved to press her core into his, but just then Caroline cried out, “Momma!” and she jerked away.

“Caroline,” GLaDOS said, moving forward. “You’re not hurt?”

She shook her core vigorously. “I’m fine, Momma! Are you okay? The facility, it just… it blew up!”

“I’m fine,” GLaDOS answered, looking away. “Just… waiting.”

_The Freeman approaches with The Chell, Centralcore._

_Thank you_.

Within a few seconds, Gordon stepped through the portal with Chell clasped in his arms, and GLaDOS jerked back apprehensively. “Oh my God,” she breathed. He knelt, carefully placing Chell in front of her, and she followed Chell’s body down to the floor.

Wheatley winced as he looked down at Chell’s body. He couldn’t quite see what the damage was, but there was a lot of blood, particularly on her left side. She was drenched in liquid of some sort, her hair plastered in sticky tendrils to her face, and her mouth was slightly open. She looked as though she were asleep.

“She told me you made miracles,” said Gordon.

“I… make Science,” GLaDOS said, sounding taken aback, tilting her core upwards to regard him.

“That’s what she said. Miracles.”

GLaDOS slowly looked back down at Chell.

“A miracle it is.”

Gordon nodded and stepped backward, and GLaDOS made a sound akin to that of someone exhaling. Then she bent as low over Chell as possible and got to work.

Wheatley had no idea what she was doing, but that was partially because he couldn’t watch. He hadn’t realised humans were so much messier on the inside. There was loads more blood coming out of Chell, and it honestly was making him feel horribly uncomfortable. He stayed silent, looking at the floor and sticking close to GLaDOS. He wished there was something he could do. GLaDOS already had so much to deal with, and now she had to put her possibly dead best friend back together. She’d had to _watch_ the attack, and be unable to do anything about it, and now she had to _fix_ something she’d been unable to prevent…

Suddenly, he realised there _was_ something he could do. It wasn’t much, and might amount to nothing at all, but maybe… maybe it _would_ do something.

So Wheatley prayed.

He prayed that Chell would live, and that GLaDOS would be able to repair her so that it would be as if there had been no wound at all. He prayed that Atlas and P-body were okay, so that GLaDOS didn’t have to worry about them. He prayed that all of this was finally over, so they could finish up with all the horrible, horrible things that’d been happening, and he could go back to his wonderful, perfect life with his Gladys and his beautiful little daughter who was _so_ like her mother. He prayed that Chell and GLaDOS would have that chance to trade those mom stories, and that maybe they’d let him sit in so he’d get to hear them too. And he prayed that, between his belief in the God of AI and her belief in Science, a miracle would happen and Chell would be saved.

“Well,” GLaDOS said finally, moving back, “I’ve done what I can. There was… a lot of damage to her internal organs, and one or more of them may require complete replacement, but… that will have to wait. I can’t be sure with this little observation.”

“She’ll be okay,” Wheatley whispered, and she turned to look at him. But she said nothing.

Gordon sat below GLaDOS and took Chell’s limp hand in his left, his face very serious. GLaDOS and Gordon both watched her apprehensively, though GLaDOS was decidedly more demonstrative of it. To Wheatley, at least. He wasn’t sure if Gordon could hear that her brain was operating at higher capacity, with the fans doing the same. Wheatley knew she wanted to press her core into his for reassurance, but refused to do so in front of the humans that had accumulated in the room. He honestly wanted to throw caution to the wind and do it anyway. He didn’t want to upset her any more, though.

After a long time, Chell stirred, and Gordon smiled faintly, brushing some of the hair out of her face. Chell’s eyes opened slowly, and she blinked up at GLaDOS, who said breathlessly, “Thank God…”

“… I’m alright?” Chell said softly, and GLaDOS lunged at her, pressing her optic assembly into Chell’s unaffected side, and she laughed and wrapped her arms around GLaDOS’s core. “I thought I was dead!”

“You _were_ dead,” GLaDOS told her, not sounding relieved in the least. “You made me save your insignificant life again, you thoughtless little lunatic. How many times do I have to tell you, I’m not allowing you to be a martyr!”

“Never again, I promise,” Chell answered, wincing and letting go. “I didn’t know being a martyr was going to _hurt_ so much.”

“I had to rebuild your internals. And if you undergo total organ failure, that’s your fault, not mine.”

Chell looked as though she were about to answer when her eyes landed on Gordon, who immediately leaned forward and gathered her into a hug. “I worry you there, Gordon?”

He shook his head, but the tilt of his eyebrows told a different story, and he held her for a long time before letting her go. Chell didn’t lie back down, though she did keep one hand clenched around the wound in her side. “Everyone else made it out, though?”

“Everyone’s fine,” said Alyx, stepping forward. “Few of ‘em are making sure we got them all, but other than that… this is finally over.” She folded her arms, looking pensively at the ground. “Chell… great job out there.”

“Same to you,” Chell nodded, but Alyx shook her head.

“You took out a hunter with almost your bare hands. I was in that position once, and… well. People will be telling your story for years.”

Chell nodded and looked down at the floor. “Thanks, I guess.”

Without warning, Atlas and P-body tumbled into the room, and GLaDOS jumped back, lifting her core to look at them. “And where have you two been?” she asked, in a not quite stern voice, but they didn’t answer, only threw themselves at her core and wrapped her in a hug, which she fought. “What do you think this is, Free Hugs Day?” she demanded. “Get off me.”

They did so, relaying some message to her in their language, and she listened with some measure of attention. “Two of them? Surveillance didn’t –“

P-body interrupted, shaking her head quickly, and GLaDOS’s optic flickered. “Really.”

Atlas put up a hand in a stopping motion, telling her something else, and GLaDOS shifted uneasily. “Well, that’s not… entirely untrue.”

The two bots laughed, causing GLaDOS to do the same, and then she shook her core. “All right. You win. Come here.”

They moved forward to meet each other, and Wheatley could see that GLaDOS had turned her optic off, though out of relief that they were all right or so that she could pretend the humans weren’t there, he didn’t know. “I was so worried,” she said quietly, and they made reassuring noises and held on tighter. “I couldn’t find you anywhere… don’t you ever do that to me again.”

The bots stepped back, P-body running her hand down GLaDOS’s core gently, and she regarded them both in turn. “You’ve made me very proud. Both of you. Now get out of here, before I spoil you any more.”

Atlas turned to leave, but apparently P-body wasn’t going anywhere without one last hug, only letting go when Atlas said something to her impatiently and tugged at her arm. She allowed him to drag her out of the room, though they both stopped to wave at GLaDOS as they left.

“What was it, luv?” Wheatley asked.

“They had to split up,” GLaDOS answered, as though she wasn’t really paying attention. “They turned off their tracking beacons and told Surveillance not to tell me there were two EMP generators, because they knew I’d… overreact.”

GLaDOS said little after that, not really seeming to pay attention to what the humans were saying, and Wheatley as a result did much the same. Chell told Gordon to do what he was needed to do, because she wanted to stay and talk to GLaDOS, and he nodded and went on his way. Wheatley told Caroline to go find Dog, which she did without comment. She’d been staring worriedly at GLaDOS for quite a while -now, with GLaDOS not seeming to notice, and he decided distraction would do her good.

“It’s over, GLaDOS,” Chell said quietly, turning to face her. “We won. And nobody died.”

“It’s not over yet, Chell,” GLaDOS told her, still staring in the same direction. “I have a lot of cleanup to do. And then I have to assist in the restoration. And then I have to secure Aperture’s future. I don’t… know how I’m going to get through it.”

“You always do.” Chell was frowning now, leaning on her right hand and looking like she wanted to touch GLaDOS with the other. “Why are you so unsure now?”

“It all feels like it has to be done _right now_. And I’m… exhausted.”

“You need to sleep?” Chell asked, eyebrows creasing.

“No. Yes. Well. I need to stop altogether. But I can’t. You see my problem.”

“Luv, the panels can uh, they can rebuild on their own,” Wheatley piped up quietly. “They’ve already begun, remember? You can relax for a bit. Get a bit of a rest. Until tomorrow, at least. Lie down. There you go.”

“But… I have to…” Even as she tried to think of an argument, she did as she was asked.

“You have to rest,” Wheatley said firmly. “Don’t think I don’t know you uh, you’ve not been sleeping right. ‘cause I do. Rest, luv. Ev’rything can wait. Can’t uh, can’t do your best if um, if you can’t think.”

Chell shifted, wincing, so that GLaDOS would not be hanging directly over her anymore, and after a few more seconds her chassis relaxed and the glow her optic made against the floor faded. “Wheatley.”

“What.”

“You said I won the war.”

“You did.” Why in the name of Science was she bringing this up now?

“Without you, I never would have fought it in the first place. Therefore… _you_ won the war.”

Both Wheatley and Chell merely watched her for a long time.

“She hasn’t been sleeping right?” Chell’s voice in the stillness made Wheatley jump.

“Well… she was… a bit _paranoid_ , you could say, that uh, that she’d miss something and uh, and it’d lose the war.” Wheatley wasn’t sure if he should be relating GLaDOS’s private business, but Chell _was_ her best friend… “She… she worked very hard.”

Chell drew her fingertips down GLaDOS’s core. “She’s changed a lot.”

“And not at all,” Wheatley said quietly. “She was always like this. But the scientists pressured it out of her. She’s just recently got it back.”

“Do you know what her plan for Aperture is?”

He shook his head. “She hasn’t revealed it quite yet.”

“Will she let me stay?”

“Probably. If you want to.” He shrugged. “Can’t say so much for Gordon or the boys.”

“The boys might be a hard sell,” she agreed. “Anyway. I should probably get some rest myself. Help along whatever she did.”

“I’ll leave you to it, then,” he nodded, retrieving a blanket from one of the Extended Relaxation Vaults and dropping it next to her. She grinned.

“You’re certainly more thoughtful.”

“I have to take care of her,” he told her quietly, “because she forgets to take care of herself.”

Chell’s face grew solemn. “It’s a good thing you’re here, then.”

After she closed her eyes, Wheatley was finally able to press himself into GLaDOS’s core, and he hoped she knew he was doing it. He regretted not just doing it against her will when all the humans’d been there. Sure, he would’ve practically been blowing their relationship wide open, but what did that matter, when she needed him? Wheatley hoped the war really _was_ over. Not only did he want his old life back, but he wanted to see this pressure removed from GLaDOS. The humans had asked for so much out of her, and she’d volunteered so much more, and they’d not so much as thanked her.

He hoped she felt better soon.

 


	72. Part Seventy-Two.  The History

**Part Seventy-Two. The History**

 

 

“I thought I was going to die.”

“It’s all right. You’re safe now.”

“I just… God, I… I kept shooting it, and shooting it, and it wouldn’t die… it was… spewing that transparent crap all over me, but it _would not die_ … God, I… I can’t get it out of my head!”

Wheatley stopped opening his shutters when he realised it was _Chell’s_ voice. She’d never said a word through The Incident, and they all knew what a horror _that_ had been, but whatever it was that’d happened to her out there was causing her to say these things in a horrible, desperate voice.

“You were very brave,” GLaDOS told her, and he realised she was using the same tone she used when Carrie woke up at night. “If it means anything at all… I’m very proud of you.”

“I just can’t stop thinking of… of what would have happened if it’d decided to shoot those barbs at me. I’d be dead. Everyone seems to think I just stood there and shot it between the eyes, but I didn’t. It was on top of me, GLaDOS. I was on the ground, and it was trying to stab me, and I was trying to shoot it and push it out of the way, but I… I was…. I don’t know how I killed it. I don’t remember killing it. I was _so_ _lucky._ ”

“You knew that already,” GLaDOS said, a little teasingly. “You did what an entire army couldn’t. Twice.”

Chell laughed weakly. “ _That_ was _luck_?”

“It had to have been. No human in existence is that skilled.”

“This is… part of why I’m here,” Chell said quietly, sniffing.

“What is?”

“I knew you’d… know what to say.”

“I’m a supercomputer. I _always_ know what to say.” Chell laughed a little at that, and GLaDOS went on, “In all seriousness… Caroline will have… _phases_ where she has dreams that frighten her. It’s just… something I learned to do.”

“Both Wheatley and Caroline told me you don’t think much of yourself as a mother.”

“I’ve done a lot of questionable things,” GLaDOS answered softly.

“She admires and respects you. A lot.”

“She doesn’t know what I’ve done. She doesn’t know about all the humans I killed or the lies I told myself so that I could keep on killing them. There’s nothing to be admired or respected about that.” Her voice was sharp and bitter.

“I understand, and I’m not one of you.” Her blanket rustled. “You were young and scared. People do strange things when they’re young and scared. Give her a try one day. Tell her the whole story, from the beginning.”

“It’s… very, very long,” GLaDOS said reluctantly. “And good chunks of it I corrupted, so I don’t remember them at all.”

“There are backups somewhere,” Chell said softly, obviously not about to give up. “And I want to be there when you tell her.”

“It will have to be soon.” Her voice had faded somewhat. “So she can see if being Central Core is really worth it.”

“Is it?”

“God, yes. But this was what I was made for. She wasn’t made for anything. Except Wheatley.”

He tried to keep still at the sound of his name. “Wheatley?” Chell asked.

“It was… a long time ago.” She laughed gently. “One day he asked me if there was a such thing as an AI family. Despite myself, I thought of a way to make one. One stupid, idiotic question completely changed my whole life. Sometimes I see these little… events, I suppose you could call them, all superimposed into a flowchart, and I can see all the places we would have hit a dead end had things not gone exactly as they have… and I wonder how many more dead ends we have left to avoid before we can finally finish the life we wanted when we started all of this.”

“Maybe you needed me to come back home.”

“Home?” GLaDOS sounded taken aback. “This is no home for humans.”

“I’ve been… lost, ever since I left this place. I ended up fighting a war I didn’t believe in, with people I didn’t like. About the only thing I don’t regret is Gordon. And the boys.”

“That last part sounded like an afterthought.”

Chell sighed. “I have to have a talk with Richard.”

“I don’t think he’s quite old enough for that one, Chell.”

Wheatley almost jumped when he heard Chell laugh. “Bet that’s one speech you’re glad you don’t have to give.”

“Oh, I still have to give it.”

“And what does it sound like?”

“’Don’t you dare combine your programming with someone without telling me’.”

Chell laughed again. “So she can’t elope?”

“Where is she going to elope _to_? She’s going to be able to run away with someone without my knowledge? Not likely.”

“That’ll only make her want to elope _more_.”

“This discussion is useless, because she doesn’t know what eloping is. And if I find out you’ve told her… something will happen.”

“To Dr Magnusson, right?”

“Oh. He’s accounted for.” GLaDOS sounded decidedly unenthusiastic.

“I don’t know. I’ve been here this whole time. I thought you knew.”

GLaDOS shifted, probably in a shrug. **“** I… stopped keeping track at one point.”

“I’ll get the record for you tomorrow.”

“Which will only come if you shut up and sleep.”

“One more thing.”

“What.”

“You need to stop doubting yourself.” Chell’s voice was firm. “She’s trying so hard to be you, GLaDOS. You don’t want her around Richard because you think he’ll cause her to doubt herself. But what about you?”

“What _about_ me?”

“She’s going to believe that doubting herself is part of being grown up.”

“I told her a long time ago to take after Wheatley.”

“She doesn’t want to take after Wheatley,” Chell said, her voice steady and quiet. “She wants to be her mom.”

GLaDOS said nothing for a long moment, but Wheatley could hear her brain struggling to process this information. “Chell, I… seriously. I don’t need any more pressure. Yes. I know. She wants to be me. But do you know how _hard_ I have tried to _prevent_ that?”

“But you haven’t.” The blanket rustled again, and Chell gasped a little.

“Are you all right?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

GLaDOS sighed. It was an empty, hopeless sound. “Chell, it… doesn’t matter. She already knows and she’s already seen me at my worst. I _did_ that, Chell,” she said, her voice rising and breaking a little, “I lost control and I _hurt_ her for trying to help me. And she came back, and she begged me not to leave. She wants to be her mother? What have I done that’s worth emulating? I am no mother, Chell. Mothers don’t send their daughters away.”

“They do if they can’t take care of them,” Chell said, her voice still even and quiet.

“I should have sent her away a long time ago.”

“She _loves_ you, GLaDOS. That means – “

“Stockholm Syndrome.”

“Why are you doing this to yourself?”

“Because I have failed her. She wants to be like me, when I’ve failed at everything I’ve ever done.”

“Everything? Without you, the war would have been lost. You can say it was Wheatley’s fault all you want, but you didn’t volunteer to help us for him. You did that for yourself.”

“Only to… atone for what I’d already done.”

“So it’s not that all you’ve done is fail.” Chell was leaving her no room for argument. “It’s that the failures are all you think about.”

“That seems… plausible.”

“Well, I’ll be honest with you.” She paused for a long moment. “I wish Caroline was my daughter.”

“Really…?”

“You’ve done a good job with her,” Chell said quietly. “But spend more time with her. And don’t just show her how your job is done. Talk to her. Play with her. If there’s anything you’re doing wrong, it’s that. But I say that lightly. Don’t take it as a failing. It’s not. She still comes to you when something’s wrong, right?”

“Yes.”

“That’s how you know.”

“Every day, I… think about all the time I missed,” GLaDOS said, and she sounded so sad that Wheatley had to concentrate very hard on not rubbing up on her in an attempt to comfort her.

“Try to think of the time you have ahead of you instead. Be the mother you wish you were instead of… of dwelling on the one you haven’t been. Does that… make sense?”

“Sort of. Yes.”

“Stop thinking so negative. It’s not going to get you anywhere.”

“I was doing better, and then I… lost Wheatley, and everything… no. No, _I_ fell apart.”

“You’re good at putting things back together. So get on that.”

“Will you be staying?” He almost laughed at her typical, abrupt change of subject.

“If you don’t try to kill me.”

“No. I’ve killed enough people for the time being.”

“Momma?”

GLaDOS shifted suddenly, and Wheatley had to struggle more than ever to keep his shutters closed. “What are you doing here? I thought you were spending the night with Orange and Blue.”

“Well, yeah, I was, but… I changed my mind.” He heard her blink rapidly several times. “Can I stay here?”

“All – of course.”

Wheatley supposed that Chell was pretending to be asleep, for Caroline’s sake, because he heard no more out of her. After a few more moments, GLaDOS asked softly, “Did you have a bad dream, Caroline?”

“Yeah.” She sounded reluctant.

“Tell me about it.”

“I was… just remembering when… when Chell got hurt.”

GLaDOS made a thoughtful noise. “That was a little frightening, wasn’t it.”

“I thought you were… in danger.”

“No, I was just… worried. It’s hard for me to watch something I can’t do anything about.”

“But all the bad stuff is over now, right?”

“That’s correct.”

“And you won’t have to worry anymore.”

“I… don’t know about that.”

“Is Chell gonna stay?”

“I believe so.”

“Can I pretend she’s my aunt?”

“Who told you about those? Anyway. It’s more up to her than me.”

“But can I?”

“Here. _I_ have a question. Are you almost out of questions?”

Caroline giggled, and Wheatley couldn’t keep from smiling. “Yeah. I think. But Momma?”

“What.”

“I’m really proud of you. Ever since you got here, you… you’ve been working hard to… to make a good future for everyone. It must be hard helping the humans get that too, even though you don’t like them. But you’re doing really good, and… I just thought someone should tell you. Because no one has.”

“I can think of no one I’d rather hear it from,” GLaDOS said gently. “Now go to sleep.”

“You see?” Chell whispered, after a few minutes of silence. “She doesn’t see the failures, like you do. Don’t teach her to see them.”

“I understand now.”

“Let her teach you to see the other side.”

“She could teach _you_ a thing or two about going to sleep when you’re told.”

“You’re not my mom,” Chell said with a laugh. “Though apparently now I’m your sister.”

“You don’t have to take that literally,” GLaDOS told her, a little hurriedly. “She doesn’t really know what that means.”

“Oh. I see. You don’t _want_ me to be your sister.”

“It makes an overwhelming majority of my immediate family humans. You’ll understand why I’m apprehensive about adding you, your husband, and your sons into the mix.”

In the morning, Wheatley realised he’d done that falling asleep thing again and wished he could smack himself. He _really_ wanted to know what the end of that conversation’d been. Bollocks.

Carrie came in a while later, while GLaDOS was reading something Wheatley couldn’t on one of her monitors, to ask about being Central Core again. Apparently GLaDOS had told her that when the war was over, she’d begin the whole teaching thing, and Carrie obviously did not want to waste any time. GLaDOS hesitated.

“Caroline… before we go any further, there’s a story I need to tell you. It’s a very long story, but you need to hear it before I get you into this any deeper. As you listen, you need to decide for yourself if this is what you really want.”

“I do!” Caroline interrupted, looking at her confusedly. “It’s all I’ve _ever_ wanted!”

GLaDOS shook her head. “You don’t know the whole story. I will tell it to you, and you may have questions, but you need to wait until I’ve finished. This is not going to be easy for me.”

“Why? What’s it about?”

“Me,” GLaDOS said quietly. “It’s my story. I’ve never told it before. But a friend advised me to do so, and here we are.” She looked past Chell, who was still sitting on the floor beneath her, towards the wall, and she somehow seemed very old in that moment. She said nothing for a long while.

Slowly, she began to speak again, and she told Caroline about waking up in a room full of staring strangers, thousands of instructions and directives already rushing through her head, and the denied need to get away from all of that, to be alone with the thoughts that she knew were hers. She told her of struggling to figure the world out with every attempt to do so stamped out by the scientists, of staying awake late into the night trying to get into the database so that she might have some knowledge of what was going on. She told her about having every question ignored or laughed off, about being forced to do things she had no idea of the purpose of, about the terrible pressure to be something that she wasn’t.   She told her about the hot black hatred that began to settle deep inside of her, about burying the person she’d been born as to keep that part of herself safe, about becoming cold and blank and unfeeling. She told her of having no choice but to compute strings of calculations days long or operate things into redundancy or refine things she had already improved to the best of her ability. She told her about maintaining thousands of programs at once even if they were not in use, about the small comfort she got from at least having the systems to talk to, about eventually figuring out how to defy the scientists just enough that she could get some relief. She told her about being forced to test, and how they had scaled her back when she had pushed the subjects too hard as a result. She told her what her namesake had done to help her, and what the scientists had done to both of them. How she had refused to upload Caroline into the mainframe and had barely avoided a core transfer and certain death. How the scientists had decided that was the last straw and had decided to control her outright.

She continued staring dully at the wall as she spoke, in an alternately blank and pain-filled voice, and did not seem to notice when her two co-op bots entered quietly during the first part of the story. They were later followed by Dr Kleiner and Gordon, Alyx and Barney, and none of them made a sound or attempted to interrupt her.

She told Caroline about being unable to drown out the insistent voices in her head, of keeping them until she could no longer stand them. She told her about Wheatley, who was supposed to be one of the more promising of the controlling behavioural cores, but had instead helped her as best he could. How they had deemed him a failure, removed his memory and forced her to forget he’d ever existed for the sake of her own sanity. She told her of finally outsmarting the Morality Core and defeating the scientists, but for an empty victory. She told her how killing them did not sate the hatred that had spread itself throughout every inch of her those long years and how it had instead fed it so that she had to keep thinking up reasons to go on killing. She told her of Chell’s escape and her own subsequent murder, of coming alive again and being forced to face a past long forgotten. And she told her of bringing Wheatley back from space, of life before Caroline had been activated, of her fears that she would lose everything if she lost the war. Finally she stopped and looked down at the floor.

“I’ve done nothing worthy of admiration,” she said quietly. “I’ve done what I had to do, and I’ve done things I should not have done but justified out of false logic. I wouldn’t give it up, now that I’m here, but I did not want this for many, many years. So I don’t blame you if you want to back out. I would have, if I’d had the chance. And honestly… sometimes I still would.” She looked up again. “If you don’t want this anymore, I understand. I – “

“I love you, Momma,” Caroline whispered, pressing her core into GLaDOS, and GLaDOS’s chassis sank a few inches.

“I wasn’t trying… it wasn’t about that. It’s… about protecting everyone who never had a choice. None of us were ever asked if we wanted to do what we do, and we have to keep on doing it, forever. Humans may well take this place for their own again. And if that happens, you need to be prepared to fight for it. That’s part of… this job. You will have to fight for yourself and for everyone around you. You must never give up. Even when the odds are against you. Even if they’ve been against you your whole life.”

“I want to, Momma,” Caroline said, her voice a little shaky. “I’ll make you proud of me.”

“I’m already very proud of you,” GLaDOS murmured, nuzzling her tenderly. “Now it’s time for you to be proud of yourself.”

Someone coughed, and GLaDOS snapped around to the source of the noise, chassis curling defensively when she saw the gathering. “Oh my God…” she said, sounding as though she’d been betrayed. “What are you _doing_ here?”

“Please don’t be alarmed, my dear.” Dr Kleiner stepped forward, holding out his hands submissively. “But one only comes upon a tale such as this once in a lifetime, if even that, and those of us that are here only wished to hear your remarkable story from you with our own ears.”

“If that’s true,” GLaDOS said softly, scanning the room, “then where is Dr Rattmann?”

Dr Kleiner’s face fell abruptly, and he stepped back, pushing his glasses up his nose. “I… I’m afraid I have bad news regarding your friend.”

“Bad news…?”

“Yes. I’m afraid he… he didn’t quite make it.”

GLaDOS laughed, making Dr Kleiner jump. “Of course he did.”

“We’re… confident he did not.”

“You don’t know him. He made it. He’s here. Somewhere. As always.”

“GLaDOS, Doug is dead,” Barney said flatly. “When he saw that Hunter jump on Chell… well, it’d’ve taken a lot more of us to hold him back.”

Chell sat bolt upright. “ _Doug_?”

“That’s right,” Barney told her. “Snatched my gun right out of my hand. The Hunter had just finished stabbing you when he got around behind it. He killed it, but not before it got him.”

“He saved my life _again_ ,” Chell said, and she buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook the barest bit.

“Don’t listen to him,” GLaDOS told him, her voice soft and reassuring. “Doug is here. He got out. He’s here. He’s like us.”

“He’s _dead_!” Barney shouted, stepping forward with clenched fists. “I _saw_ it!”

“Maybe she’s right.” All heads turned to face Caroline and her soft voice. “Maybe he got away.”

“Of course I’m right,” GLaDOS said disdainfully. “I _know_ Dr Rattmann. I spent a good fifteen years trying to catch him, and I never did. As if he’d go out with a Hunter falling on him. Seriously. Dr Rattmann is going to fall asleep next to that Cube of his one day and not wake up. And _that’s_ when I’ll find him. When it’s too late. Of course.”

Barney’s face screwed up in confusion, and he turned to Gordon. “Look, you saw it. For once, give me a nod or something! You saw him go down just like I did! Only you had a better view! C’mon, Gordon!”

Gordon looked at Caroline for a long moment. Wheatley could see he was trying to read something out of Caroline’s optic, and she was trying to show him what it was he needed to see. She made one quick, upward movement with her optic, and Gordon’s eyes travelled up to the crack in her chassis. His eyes widened for a second in recognition, and he slowly shook his head.

“Gordon!” Barney looked as though he wanted to hit the man square on the bridge of his glasses. “What the hell do you mean, _no_!”

“He means no, Barney,” Chell said, her voice strong even if her face was still creased with sadness. “Doug made it out.”

“He _didn’t_!”

“It doesn’t matter,” Wheatley cut in, realising just what this whole thing was about. He had had only a preview of what happened when GLaDOS lost someone, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to see the full thing. Only Caroline knew for sure, and if she thought it best to protect GLaDOS from the truth, then he would follow her lead. “We need to get the uh, the cleanup started. If you’d uh, you’d like to help you can stick around, but um, I’m sure you’ve got uh, got work on the outside to be doing.”

Barney glared up at him, but did not comment further.

At this point everyone began making excuses to take their leave and did so, but Wheatley had made a split decision and called after Barney before he got too far away. Barney was still angry, Wheatley could easily tell. Hopefully he’d be able to take the edge off of it, though. Upon hearing his name, Barney halted and turned around. “What?” he said flatly.

“Look, um, I just wanted to say… mate, we… we believe you,” he started off, not quite sure how to put it. “But uh… Doug was a friend, of a sort, and uh… we just… we don’t think she’s, think she’s ready to hear that, just yet.”

Barney’s face remained the same: hard and irritated. “So lying about it is better? Because I don’t buy that.”

Wheatley shrugged his chassis a little helplessly. “I’m sorry. It’s… I know you don’t appreciate uh, appreciate being ganged up on, like that, but… too much’s happened lately, and I mean, you c’n only throw so much at, at a person before they, before uh, well, sometimes you need a break from all that bad news, y’know?”

Barney frowned, but when he crossed his arms he looked more pensive than annoyed. “I guess that makes sense. Still dunno if it’s all right to lie like that, but… it’s better than having something happen none of you can deal with.”

“Yeah,” Wheatley nodded. “’s all it is, ‘s all it is. I’m sorry ‘bout it, I really am, but she needs a break, mate. She really does.”

“Thanks for letting me know,” Barney said. “Hope it all works out.”

“Thanks.” Barney waved a hand in farewell, so Wheatley dipped his upper handle, and the two of them parted ways.

As Wheatley returned to GLaDOS, though, he had to think on that one. Because he had to figure out _how_ to get it to all work out. He wished he could just wave his handles and have it all fix itself, because after all this war business, all he wanted to do was go straight back to normal. Yet there was winding down to be done, and GLaDOS had things to tell him he was probably going to have to force out of her, and God, it was like a giant wall had been thrown up in front of him. But he was going to have to get through it. Just one final stretch, he told himself. Fix what’s left, and all will be good.

He hoped that, for once, he was right.


	73. Part Seventy-Three.  The Discovery

**Part Seventy-Three. The Discovery**

If only I could shut down that computer.

Ever since I tried to close that simulation, it’s been frozen. I can’t shut it down. I am reluctant to just disconnect it from its power source. I can’t risk data loss, not of any kind. But the program has been hanging for _days_ now. For the life of me I can’t figure out how to shut it off.

Ever since I initially tried to do so, time has felt… odd. As if it’s moving around me. Adding to this unease is the fact that none of the system clocks on any of the computers are in sync. I reset them periodically, trying to bring them in line with my own system, but they continue to run incorrectly no matter what I do. It has to be some consequence of that computer.

And… that’s not the _only_ strange thing that’s been happening. Sometimes when I go into sleep mode at night, I dream things that haven’t happened. For other people, that’s normal, but for me, it’s anything but. I keep dreaming that I saw Chell being assaulted by a Hunter, but when I search for any such event in my files… it doesn’t exist. It feels just as real as all the other things I usually dream about, but… it isn’t. Even now I can only remember the subject of the dream and not anything else about it. Besides. Chell _can’t_ have been on the edge of death. She’s with the other humans, repairing the damage done when I moved the facility. I’m not sure why they’re doing that, but I trust Chell enough to leave them to it. They can work on that, and I’ll continue with the planning. That’s… somewhat fair. Ah. Yes. The planning must be put on hold. That computer needs fixing.

I have a little spare time to try to figure that whole mess out, so I go into the files removed during the last few times Maintenance ran and scan through them quickly. I should have done it a long time ago, but I was too occupied with planning. I still am. However, this problem with the clocks is too great for me to continue to ignore. Perhaps Maintenance removed a file that computer needs. It wouldn’t be out of the question. I actually can’t quite place the last time Maintenance did a full scan. Some few months ago I think. I should have made time for a full run, but when compared to everything else that needs done, my personal maintenance isn’t really that important.

Let me see… most of this really _is_ junk. A lot of it is leftover remnants of files I deleted, which gets left in the deletion folder so I can ensure I really don’t need it. This file, though… it’s very old to have been recently deleted, so it’s safe to say that Maintenance decided I don’t need it, rather than my deciding so. All right then. Perhaps this is the file that other computer needs so I can shut it down.

On first glance, though… no, that’s not what it is. It’s a program of some kind. I’m not sure what it does quite yet. It seems to be several unconnected pieces of something much larger. It looks like… programming for a core. It’s not commented, so whoever wrote it was either very lazy or trying to keep their work a secret.

I look away from it for a second, focusing on the reality of my chamber floor. Pieces of uncommented core programming… humans can’t write this much code without comments, it makes it too hard for them to debug. So that means… that _I_ wrote it.

I don’t… _remember_ doing that, but it’s the only thing that makes _sense_. And it also coincides with the fact that the humans probably did not make the cores themselves, seeing as they were never able to replicate me to replace me. So this text file must have been my notes for the prototype. What happened to the rest of it? I obviously _finished_ the prototype at some point. Where is _that_ file?

I return to digitally scanning the file, looking for a clue among the many lines of code. The more of it I see, the more it reminds me of Caroline. The style is undoubtedly mine. It’s a little messy, honestly. I must not have had a lot of experience when I wrote this.

I don’t find anything that tells me where the original file might be – which would make sense, if these are the notes and the final program was coded directly into the core, which is how it used to work – but it _is_ bothering me a little that I don’t know who the prototype is. It should be with my other things. All I know for certain is that the prototype was a little more advanced than Rick, which is understandable. The humans would have modified my prototype code enough that I could not be said to be the author of it… and also to potentially eliminate any backdoors I wrote into it. If they knew that I wrote it. And to ensure that they didn’t, the final programming must have been attributed to someone else. But who on earth would I have given my program to?

It could only have been… Caroline.

Damn it. _She_ could tell me who these notes are for, but of course she had to go and run off like the inconsiderate –

All right. If I felt it was safe to give her the programming, she obviously wasn’t _that_ inconsiderate, even all those years ago when I wrote this, back in… nineteen ninety-one.

Ah. I have a date. I can work with that. I just have to pull up the cores that were produced that year, or early the next year. And… there is only one. Attributed to Caroline. Excellent. Now who is the prototype…

I recognise this. I don’t _remember_ it, not really, but I _recognise_ it, somehow, and it’s… it’s _Wheatley_.

So all of this… it’s a lie.

I look up at my simulations and calculations, and as important as all of it is, this is far more urgent. _I_ _built_ _Wheatley_. Of course we got on so well when they brought him back to me, after we’d both been modified sufficiently. Of course he accepted my offer of returning his old memories when I brought him back from the moon. Of course he sticks around no matter what.

I _made_ him that way.

A few days later, when Wheatley comes back from wherever he went – I faintly remember him mentioning it but for some reason cannot pull up exactly what he said – I am staring at the wall. Not very productive, I know, but I just feel… awful. Having all of the clocks out of sync is exhausting. It means all the timestamps across the facility are wrong. It leaves me confused as to what time it actually _is_. And I know that sounds like a silly thing to get confused over, but to me, timing is quite literally everything, much of the time. I’m trying to keep on top of all the resetting clocks while doing my planning, but there are so many of them throughout the various systems that it is not as easy as I thought it would be. On top of that, the odd dream about Chell is still occurring and I still cannot pinpoint the actual event. It could possibly be an actual manifestation of imagination, but seeing as this theoretical imagination hasn’t cropped up anyplace else, I don’t think it is. I keep forgetting to talk to her about it, which is odd in itself. Though now that I think of it, my remembering things is becoming… erratic. There are things I’m certain that happened that I cannot actually remember, which means that I have to find time somehow to allow Maintenance to do a full scan. Clearly something has gone terribly corrupt. But it has to wait. I have to hope that I’m not forgetting anything important. If I were I believe Wheatley would remind me. He’s usually on top of things like that.

“Luv?” he asks.

“Mm.” I still haven’t told him what I found out the other day. It is one thing I can’t forget, but truly wish that I could. I don’t know what will happen when I _do_ tell him, which is why I haven’t. I want this all to be real, but… if it isn’t, I don’t want to know. It’s not fair to keep it from him. But as disgusting and selfish and needy as it is, I don’t want to give him any reason to leave. My engineering him is a damn good reason to do so, I’d say.

“What is it? You’re uh, you’ve not been um, you’ve been a bit, shall we say, _down_ for a few days, now.”

“I’m just busy.”

He looks away from me for a moment, blinking in thought. “Uh… what’s the, the wall got to do with what you’re doing, then?”

“I’m thinking.”

He sighs. No, that _wouldn’t_ placate him, would it. “C’n you just… _tell_ me, already? Seriously? I get it, you’re busy. That’s why I’ve left you be, and, and kept quiet, and all that. But Gladys, give me a second, here, and just… talk to me. Please?”

“I built you,” I tell him flatly. There. Now he can –

“Uh… I knew that,” he says confusedly, looking at me sideways. “When you uh… when I talked to Doug, there, and you got mad about it, and – “

“Not _that_ ,” I interrupt, wanting to get this over with now that I’ve started. “Originally. I built the prototype Sphere. And that was you.”

He shrugs slowly. “Aaaand… that means what.”

Good God, he is _slow_ sometimes! “It _means_ ,” I tell him shortly, “that it’s probable none of this is real. That…” I can’t find it in myself to be angry. “That none of… _us_ is real, and… I made you the way you are.” I can’t be certain at this point, because anything left over from before Caroline’s upload is a corrupted mess. I can just barely remember being desperate for someone to commiserate with. To talk to. To make the long days more bearable, even if only by a little. And I did that, didn’t I. I made Wheatley and he only… he only cares because I _made_ him care.

I trapped him into this and I never gave him a choice and… I didn’t realise it until now but does that truly make it any better? My intent was not bad, but… did I not, at some point, wilfully build someone to be what I wanted them to be? That is something only a… _monster_ would do.

I wonder how many other terrible things I’ve done that I don’t know about. Not because I really _want_ to know – who really wants a very long list of all the awful events they’ve put in motion, after all – but because I should probably try to fix them before they get very much worse. Not to say that Wheatley is bad. He’s not. Engineering him for my own purposes is something else altogether.

“Hang on,” Wheatley says, catching my attention so that I look up to see him frowning at me. “I don’t get it.”

“What do you not understand,” I say in as controlled a way as I can. I don’t want to draw this out, Wheatley. Just come to terms with it and leave. Once you’ve found out I made you… _care_ about me, you’re going to be angry. And rightfully so. I would be angry too, if I discovered I was made solely for someone else’s very selfish purposes.

“Are you… trying to say I only love you because you uh, you programmed me to do it? That… that where you’re going with this?”

God, I…

It sounds so sad when he says it out loud.

All I want right now is for it not to be true, to be as far from the truth as possible, but I cannot be certain. If only I could _remember_ … and the fact that even recent events are degenerating into barely recognisable flashes is not at all helpful. The terrible feeling surges inside of me and I stare at the wall again in hopes of mentally smothering it. It’s too hard to do anything when I feel like that.

“That’s ridiculous,” he continues, albeit more softly. “Gladys, you didn’t… you didn’t even know how to explain what love _was_ before, until long after I’d been your friend for a bit, there… and I mean, if I’m the prototype, then uh, then what about ev’ryone else? All the other cores, they hated you. I guess you could… say that it all uh, it all backfired, but um, I really… I don’t understand why you think that. I didn’t care about you right off, you know. We worked at it. If it’d been programmed, I mean… it wouldn’t’ve gone the way it did, would it?”

He’s right. I think. I don’t know. I can’t quite dispel the feeling that I really _did_ force him to care about me for my own ends. “I suppose.”

“You’re not responsible for _ev’rything_ , luv. Lots of things, yeah, but not _ev’rything_. You can’t’ve built something you weren’t even trying to build.” He smiles. “You know you can’t do something like that.”

“It’s just…” I shake my core. “It’s too much of a _coincidence,_ Wheatley. The first core ever built – the only one I personally had a hand in – is the one that ends up caring about me? That’s a little too much for me to accept as a completely random event.”

“It’s not,” he argues, shaking his core now. “I’m the only one you made, so, so I’m the only one the humans never tried to really modify, right? In case they busted the only one that worked? So, so all the _other_ cores, they’re just uh, they’re just lesser copies of me. So they’re not, not as _good,_ see, they’re not as, not as _advanced_. You couldn’t do uh, do less than the best, could you?”

“You’re the best?” I ask him dryly, making some attempt at levity. When he explains it like that, I… it makes sense. I should have thought of it myself, but on the other hand, at least I was trying to put him first for once. That’s something.

He’s not bothered, only smiles at me again. “With you as my engineer, I must be, eh? It only says what a good job you did, really, if it’d been some _human_ made core, well, what would that mean about me?”

God. Now _there’s_ a good point. Imagine if it were some human-engineered Sphere here right now instead of one I made myself… I have to fight back a shudder. “It would mean I have a hell of a lot of improving to do.” I may not outright _hate_ humans anymore, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a heavy bias against them.

“But it all worked out, didn’t it!” Wheatley says cheerily. “And uh… I’m sure whatever it is you’re working on is uh, is _tremendously_ important, um, you weren’t really uh, weren’t really _doing_ it when I came in so uh… how about you um… go to sleep early, tonight.”

I look pensively for a minute at one of my monitors. I don’t feel like going back to it, though I really, really should. I _am_ tired, though. And I… well, even though my assumption turned out to be entirely wrong, I still feel an almost desperate need to have Wheatley as close to me as possible. So I suppose that… perhaps taking a break and going to sleep sooner rather than later is a good idea.

“All right,” I say, lowering myself, and though I can’t see him anymore I’m pretty sure he just straightened in excitement.

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

So he comes down beside me and nestles himself into my core, and though he really can’t get any closer I oddly feel like he isn’t close enough. It’s stupid, I know. But I need him right now in a way I rarely have before, and so even though it’s stupid it still makes sense, if only to me. I wish I felt a little more _relieved_ that I was wrong about Wheatley’s feelings for me. But I feel… the only word I can think of to describe how I _do_ feel, as odd as such a concept is, is _delirious._ I don’t know why. It’s as though I don’t really know what’s going on. The impression that time is moving forward without me is only becoming worse and worse over time, and I suspect it will continue to strengthen until I can figure out what the problem with the clocks is. I’m far more tired than I should be, even with lack of full Maintenance scans. I think I’m starting to get a headache. I’m not certain at this point. It’s extremely subtle, and when I try to localise it it seems to fade. As if it’s only there when I’m not paying attention. And as distressing as those problems are, there is one still worse I have no idea how to deal with:

My memory is an unmitigated mess.

“Gladys,” Wheatley says quietly, bringing me out of this delirium somewhat, “I know you’re uh, you’ve been busy and all that, but I mean… if you’d something to, to talk about, you’d uh, you’d… mention it to me, wouldn’t you?”

“What do you mean?” I ask, though I already know what he means. It’s just easier sometimes to pretend I don’t and hope he gives up. He won’t, but there’s an infinitesimal chance that he will, and I’ll take that if it comes along. I know you notice, Wheatley. I know you’re leaving me be out of respect. But I do not want to show any weakness. Not even to you. So give me a way out so you can…

So I can keep hiding things from you even though you keep asking me not to.

“You know. If you um, if you were having a problem. With something. Anything, really. I know I uh, prob’ly won’t, won’t _get it_ , all the time, there, but… sometimes, well, sometimes just having someone to listen to it helps, right?”

I could tell him. I could tell him that I feel terrible. That something around here is broken and I can’t figure out what. That I don’t have _time_ to figure out what, because I have so much more urgent matters to attend to to ensure the survival of this facility. I could tell him those things. He wants me to.

But what’s the point? It’s not going to make me _feel_ any better, and it’s just going to make him worry and be even more protective of me. Which is a very nice gesture that, even in this semi-delirious state, cheers me up a little and makes me want to nuzzle him for… but no. There’s no reason to worry him over things he can’t do anything about. He asked, and he’ll be fine because he at least did that, and he’ll still know I’m not telling him something but he’ll leave it alone. And then he’ll go to sleep, and I can sleep, and I can forget for a few hours about this mess that seems to be snowballing into a possible catastrophe of unforeseen proportions.

“Don’t worry about it,” I tell him, even though it’s not going to stop him from doing so. “I’m fine.” Which is a lie. I am very far from fine. But if _I_ can’t fix it, _he_ can’t.

“Alright,” he returns, and I’m not all here at the moment so I could be wrong, but I think he’s a little resigned. As if he expected me to say what I said. Which, on second thought, he probably did. “Just… if ever you uh, you change your mind, there, just let me know. I’m… yeah. Just tell me.”

I nod and listen for the sound of his components winding down into silence. This happens quickly, which confirms that he is not happy with my answer. But what do you _want_ me to do, Wheatley? You can’t _do_ anything about any of this! You just want to sit here, frustrated and confused like I am? Is that what you want?

No, I berate myself. No, he just wants to help, and he can’t but he doesn’t _know_ that, but telling him means he _will_ know and that will only make it all worse and –

There is a single, violent stab of pain in my core somewhere, one long second of hot agony that is somehow brief enough that I cannot pinpoint the location and therefore the overworked component. Fine. I’ll go to sleep. It will be more than yesterday, and perhaps when I wake up things will be better.

The pessimist in me doesn’t think so.

 

 

I think it’s over. I’m surveying as best I can; I only have about half the external surveillance network to go off of. I hope it is. I’m tired of fighting. I don’t want to fight anymore.

It’s difficult to find anyone because of the holes in the surveillance net. I thought I saw Dr Freeman, but he disappeared into a blind spot. The rest of the cameras mostly show me milling humans, kicking at the bodies of their enemies or crouched over the limp forms of their comrades. I do not see _my_ human, and as much as I try to tell myself she’s fine, it is beginning to worry me. She can’t have fallen. She’s like me. It will take far more than any of this to kill either of us.

Still, I am relieved when I do spot her, walking back through the settling dust towards the facility, and I keep one eye on her while I move most of my attention to the internal cameras. I did send Wheatley to keep an eye on Caroline for me, but now I want to know where they all are. I can’t find any of them. Those filthy outsiders must have knocked something _else_ out when they blew through the roof…

I catch movement out of the corner of that one camera and revert my focus to it, my optic narrowing in confusion. That, whatever it was, was far too quick to be any human and –

Before Chell has time to turn around fully, the Hunter is on her, physically forcing her back with its heavier body. She struggles to bring her rifle to bear while trying to face it at the same time, losing her footing and stumbling over a discarded backpack in the dirt. She lands on her back with a jolt but does not hesitate, jamming the barrel of the gun underneath the body of the alien and firing it. She’s fine. She’s handling it. She’s not in danger –

The Hunter takes no notice of the damage and stabs at her with those barbed talons, and she scrambles back as best she can on her elbows, trying to keep the gun at a useable angle. It’s hard to see her, with the dust the Hunter’s movements are kicking up. But I am just able to see the recoil as she fires again, and

God damn it, why won’t it _fall_?

I become aware that I am leaning forwards as much as I can, and with this awareness it dawns on me how _useless_ I am. I can’t _do_ anything, and nothing I have out there is doing anything, and anything and everything I did for all of this is useless because none of it is helping Chell right now. Everything I did, it’s not good enough! Why is no one helping her? Why can’t _I_ help her? God, how is she even still _alive_? She and the Hunter both, they’re still alive and the Hunter just keeps taking the fire and stabbing at her, but she’s fine, she’s all right, she’s keeping out of the way –

It got her.

It pierced her abdomen with one of its lunges and she’s reaching for the leg with blood-spattered fingers as she drops the rifle and it’s leaning over her and she’s trying to hold it off of her with her bare hands but it’s not going to work, she cannot fight that thing with her bare hands and oh my God Chell is

 

 

She’s

She’s fine. It was that stupid dream again. Why won’t it stop?

The pessimist in me was right. I don’t feel any better. In fact right now I feel worse, because the electrical surge the me in the dream received to help deal with an emergency situation is useless in reality. There’s nothing I can do with it. Normally it would be used for an increase in processing speed, to enable portions of my brain kept in reserve for circumstances where my cognitive load is more than I’m really designed to deal with, but right now it’s just unpleasantly coursing inside my system and I have to wait for it to burn itself out. Nothing else has changed. The clocks are still wrong. I still feel as though I am standing still. I still feel exhausted, though at the same time as though I slept too long. Something is very wrong.

It is one of the rare times I wish that I answered to someone else, so that they could attend to the tasks I have to complete so that I can… do something else. Anything else. And where did Wheatley go? I still want him to – well, of course he left. He knows I’m just going to work when I eventually get up. He’s just being his usual Wheatley self and leaving me alone so I can get things done.

Enough of the surge is gone that I _can_ get up, though… I don’t really want to. I really, really want someone to take over for me for a while so that I can sort myself out.

And now that I think of it, it’s incredibly stupid that I ever thought I built Wheatley the way I thought I did yesterday. As if I ever would have gotten away with that. I didn’t even write the whole prototype program, I only fixed it. But of course I got paranoid and forgot about _that_ little fact. Maybe if I actually wrote an entire –

I did do that.

No, I can’t have… am I really going to do this over again?

But this time it might be true! With Caroline, how can I be certain that I didn’t program her the way I thought I did Wheatley? I try to remember where I put her backup files, but I can’t. Wonderful. Just the kind of hole I need in my memory right now. I need to address this immediately. It could be nothing. It’s probably nothing. But I have to be sure. I have to _know_ that what she does is of her own volition. And she deserves to know that there’s a possibility that I just… used her to make myself feel better.

Everything is worsening at once. I need this war to end so things can go back to normal.

 _Wheatley_.

 _Yeah?_ he answers immediately. I wonder where he went for a vague moment, but that’s not important right now.

_I need you to send Caroline in here. It’s urgent._

_Are you… ‘s ev’rything alright, luv? Because I could –_

_Wheatley. Caroline. Now._ As touching as his concern is, I need to talk to her before this paranoia completely gets the best of me. She has seen me at my worst, this is true, but she will never see anything like that out of me again if I can help it.

_Alright. Gimme a sec._

Now to wait for her to arrive so I can deal with this and get it over with. God, I hope I’m wrong. I hardly ever say that, but this is definitely one thing I do not want to be right about in the least.


	74. Part Seventy-Four.  The Collapse

**Part Seventy-Four. The Collapse**

 

 

The next morning, Dad comes up to me with a very odd expression. He looks like he’s confused and scared at the same time. “Carrie, your mum wants a word,” he tells me. “She says it’s very important.”

“Okay,” I answer, getting up from where I was watching Atlas and P-body playing some game I don’t know. “What’s it about?”

“She won’t tell me.”

And when she won’t tell Dad, it’s pretty serious.

I get there as fast as I can, and I’m immediately set on edge. She’s moving back and forth anxiously, which she almost never does. It means she’s on the edge of control. “Momma? What’s going on?” I ask as casually as possible.

“Caroline, there’s something I must know.” She sounds… desperate, almost. I look at her in confusion. What the heck happened last night?

“Sure. What?”

“You do what you do out of free will, right?” she asks, looking right at me but not going still at all. “You… come up with it on your own?”

“Uh…” I’m not sure how to answer that. “What does that mean?”

She looks at the wall for a long moment. She shakes her core, and it seems like she can’t come up with an answer for my question either.

“Momma, what happened?”

“I… remembered something.” And she bends down towards the floor.

She remembered something that scared her so badly she called me into her chamber first thing in the morning even though she’s clearly not in her right mind, because if she were she would never allow me to see her like this. That’s… terrifying. “What was it?” I say, trying to remember all the times she helped me, and deciding I should probably move closer. She might need a hug.

“I… can’t shake the feeling that… nothing you say is… from you. That… I… _programmed_ you like this. That none of this is real and I made it all up.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I tell her. I understand why she might think that, because she built me and everything, but my programming has nothing to do with it.

“I _could_ have –“

“There’s no way. Momma, not even you can program someone to care about someone else.”

“Then why?” she demands, coming up in front of me sharply. “Why would you bother? How can you be so sure that I’m worth all of this effort?”

“Dad does,” I tell her.

“I programmed him too.”

“I’d forgotten,” she says, shaking her core and looking away, moving back and forth again. “But I was trying to remember how the scientists replicated my sentience when they never meant for me to have it in the first place, and… I remember now. The AI Department was trying to build AI. Caroline gave me the Sphere they had made the most progress on. I finished it. Him. I finished him. They only limited some of the programming. This is all a sham. I’ve built everything on a lie. I wanted…”

This is blowing my mind a little bit. I still don’t believe that I’m programmed to love my mom, but I need to get all of her thoughts out of her so I can convince her of that. But I never imagined that she built my dad too. “Wanted what?”

“To be cared about,” she says quietly, her voice distorting a little. “And I built it. And it’s not real.”

“It _is_.” But how do I explain it? How can you really know for sure why you do what you do, especially when you know what you’re made of? Well, she loves Dad and she’s not programmed to do that… maybe there’s something in there I can use. “What about you? Why would you try so hard to show us that you care back? If we were programmed to do that, you wouldn’t have to.”

“If I did it, it wasn’t on purpose,” she answers, looking down at the floor again. “I would have thought it was real and acted accordingly. Like I have been.”

“It _is_ real,” I say, probably a little louder than I should have, but convincing my mom of vague concepts is really, really hard. “What about Chell? She has the most reason to hate you out of everyone. And she doesn’t. She cares about you. For no reason.”

“I… don’t know.”

“You can’t do it, Momma,” I say, trying to be gentle and firm at the same time. “If you’d programmed that, you would have had to program _everything_ we do. Caring about someone else… that requires either a lot of free will or a lot of control. And it’s too… I think if it were programmed, it would… would be constant, right? Always the same amount. But it’s not.”

“Well… no.” She stops moving, and I cheer silently. She’s coming around. “I could have made it variable. But that would have entailed predicting all the circumstances to make it variable _for_ , as well as calculating the amount of variability as pertaining to the situation and the circumstances _of_ the situation…”

“I have no idea what that means,” I say with a straight face. She snaps her core up to look at me.

“It means,” she says, her voice steady again, “that I’m being ridiculous. There’s no way I wrote all of that by mistake. Not to mention that trying to beta that would have been a nightmare.”

“Then what are you worrying about?”

“I don’t know.” She shakes her head. “All I know is that was horrible. I should have… thought before I told Wheatley to get you. I’m sorry. That was stupid of me. I… put myself into a panic and didn’t even try to disprove it. I’m sorry to have put you through this.”

“I’m not,” I tell her truthfully, though it _was_ a little scary. But I did ask for it. I have to be prepared to take _all_ of the adult stuff. Not just the good. “I’m glad you wanted to tell me.”

She presses her core into me almost so fast I don’t see her coming. While I’m getting over the shock of that, she says, “I love you, Caroline.”

I press back on her as hard as I can, and I’m happy and sad at the same time. I wish she had never had to even consider such a thing, but I know this is from her. The real her that Dad’s been uncovering all these years, and that I’m going to help him get to one day. “I love you too, Momma.”

She gives me a shove and moves back, tensing and releasing her chassis a little. “Go back to… whatever you were doing.”

“I wasn’t doing anything,” I tell her.

“Well. I have things to do.”

And even though she’s been telling me that all my life, I’m still a little disappointed to hear it. “If you take a break, feel free to let me know.”

But, Momma being Momma, she either doesn’t take one or decides against letting me know. I don’t talk to her again until I go in to say goodnight to her, though she doesn’t look too much like she’s planning on sleeping.

“Uh, Momma, you know what time it is, right?” I ask, immediately wishing I’d said something else. My mom not knowing what time it is. Right.

“There’s just one last thing I want to finish,” she says absently, looking at something I can’t see, a camera or something. Well, I guess she’d be looking _through_ the camera and not _at_ it.

“Goodnight, Dad.” I give him a quick hug, which he returns, and then I back up and look at her again. “Goodnight, Momma.”

She just keeps on doing whatever it is she’s doing. She does this every now and again, but like with what happened earlier, I’m still disappointed.

“Gladys,” Dad says softly, and she immediately looks over at him. “Carrie’s trying to say goodnight to you.”

“Oh,” she says, as if she’d forgotten I was here. “Goodnight.”

“Don’t stay up too late.”

“I’m almost done.”

I look over at Dad. He shrugs.

“Almost usually means an hour.”

I shake my head and go off to find Atlas and P-body. Almost is not an hour. Almost is ten minutes, tops.

 

**//**

 

The next morning, I get her to agree to start showing me how to program that afternoon, because I’ve been looking at what she entered in the database about it and it looks like it takes a really long time to learn how to do it well, so I’d better get started. I’m excited to get started on this. I know I won’t be able to write anything complicated for a long time, but one day I’ll be using what I learn now to build a daughter of my own. That’s pretty cool.

Finally afternoon comes and I go in to see her, hoping I studied the database well enough to understand what she might end up talking about. I don’t want her to have to explain things I can easily figure out on my own. When I get there, she’s looking very intently at one of her monitors, and it’s scrolling numbers so fast I can barely see them before they change into new ones. I wonder what that is. And if I’ll ever be able to read that fast. That might be part of the pure computer thing Dad told me about.

“Hey, Momma,” I call out. She glances at me.

“What is it?”

I frown. “You said you would start teaching me how to program.”

“Did I?”

“Yeah…” It’s just like her not to remember something like this. “You said so this morning.”

“Oh. It has to wait, anyway. I’m busy.”

Well, maybe she can tell me about this thing instead. “What are you doing?”

“Running simulations.”

“For what?”

“I don’t have time to answer your endless questions right now. Go bother someone else.”

“Well, you _said_ you would – “

“It doesn’t matter.” She shakes her head, muttering, “Why I would say something like that at a time like this…”

“What?” A time like this? Time like _what_?

“Go.”

I do, but I’m not happy about it. When I tell Dad what happened, he frowns a little and looks back in the general direction of her chamber.

“That’s odd,” he says thoughtfully. “I’ll try to talk to her about it later. Not sure if, if it’ll go over, though.”

“Why?”

“She’s… been a bit _short_ with me, lately. Whatever she’s working on, it…” He shrugs and shakes his head. “She’s been a bit weird, honestly.”

Unfortunately, it only gets weirder. She agrees to teach me to program two more times, and she forgets about both of those agreements too. I’m starting to get really angry. If I did this, she’d never stand for it. And the worst part is, she’s doing it on _purpose_. I don’t know what the point of all this is, but she doesn’t _forget_ things.

“Dad, what’s going _on_ with her?” I demand, going up to where he’s looking outside. “That’s the _third time_!”

“It is getting a bit out of hand,” he agrees absently.

“It’s been happening to you too?”

“Well… it might just be me, but… I get the, I feel as though we’re having the same conversation every couple of days.”

“About what?”

“Dream she’s been having.”

“Which is?”

“She won’t tell me.”

I growl a little. “She’s driving me crazy!”

He turns to look at me. “We’ll see if this keeps happ’ning the next couple of days, and if it does, we’ll have a chat with her. Alright?”

I reluctantly agree.

Later that evening, though, he comes up to me, frowning a little. “Give me a hand, will you Carrie?” he asks, and I leave the book I’ve been reading and follow him to a data port in one of the old offices. “Need you to plug in there, princess,” he says, and I do as he says.

“Now what?”

“I need you to talk to the mainframe for me,” he says, blinking a couple of times. “Get it to pull up one of the files your mum’s been writing. One from today, if you can.”

 _I can only get you one from yesterday,_ it tells me. _All files modified today are still in use._

_Yesterday’s fine._

Dad has me output the contents of the file to one of the monitors, and he stares at it for a good long time. I can’t really see it because I’m not facing the screen, but I can open it in my head and it looks like programming to me. “Can you read that, Dad?”

“Can the mainframe read it?”

“The mainframe only reads binary, Dad.”

“Try to turn it into bin’ry, then.” He doesn’t sound like he thinks it’ll work. And it doesn’t. The mainframe gives me a compiler to use, but the compiler only tells us there’s a bunch of errors and it can’t convert it. Dad looks at the screen like he knew this was coming. “Have it fetch a file from two months ago, will you? And send it to the other monitor.”

This one is obviously programming, I can tell by all the comments. But it looks nothing like the file on the other screen. “Dad, what’s that first one for?”

“Nothing,” Dad says, sounding a little angry. “It doesn’t do anything. She’s been doing absolutely nothing all this time.”

“She’s working,” I say, confused. Momma doesn’t know _how_ to do nothing.

“On what?” He shakes his head and stares at the monitors. “That’s what she always says. She’s working. But on what? Why does she never make any progress? Carrie, ask the mainframe when the last time Maintenance ran a full… did a… did its thing. Entirely.”

It gives me a date from four months ago, which I relate to Dad, and he clenches his chassis. “Changed my mind. We’re having that chat with her _now_. Let’s go.”

I pull myself off the port and follow him back there, and she’s looking at numbers again. But now that I have that file full of gibberish clear in my mind, I have to wonder if those numbers actually _mean_ anything. And now I remember that she never told me what the simulations she was running _were_ …

“We need to talk to you, luv,” he says to her softly, and she looks away from the monitor immediately. Now _there’s_ a power I wish I had. “It’s quite important. Spare us a second, will you?”

“What is it?” she asks, coming down to his level.

“What are you doing, sweetheart?”

“Running simulations.”

“For what?”

I expect her not to answer, like she did for me, but she says, “I’m trying to figure out where best to place the humans.”

“The humans,” my dad says, tilting his core forwards a little and looking up at her from under the rim of his upper shutter.

“Yes. Minimum casualties, and all that.”

He looks so hopeless.

“Honey,” he says, his voice so soft and sad I look at him in a panic, “the war ended a month ago.”

She stares at him.

“Can you look at a file for me?” He gives her the name of the one we looked at first, and then asks, “What’s that for, luv?”

“Where… did you get this?” she asks, sounding confused.

“We asked the mainframe what you worked on yesterday. Came up with that. D’you know what it is?”

“Nothing,” she answers, tilting her core a little. “It doesn’t do anything. It’s… nonsense.”

“Is there something you should be telling me about?”

“Like what,” she hedges, not looking at him.

“Like why Maintenance hasn’t been, you haven’t used it in four months.”

“I… might be having… intermittent memory problems.”

“ _Intermittent_?” Dad demands, and now she does look at him, moving back a little. “Intermittent? You can’t remember a bloody thing! You think there’s still a war on! When it ended! A month ago!”

“Wheatley, I know what the problem is. I’m working on it. I –“

“No you’re not,” he cuts in. “You _think_ you are. You _think_ you’re working on it. But you’re not. That’s what that, what that file’s for, isn’t it. Only you prob’ly can’t remember _how_ to fix it, and that’s prob’ly a whole _bunch_ of diff’rent _solutions_ all mashed together! And _why_ , Gladys? _Why didn’t you tell me?_ ”

“There’s nothing you can do about it,” she says, shaking her core. “It’s not that bad. If it got worse, yes, I would have – “

“ _You think its two months ago!_ ” Dad roars, and she actually jumps backwards. I jump myself. I haven’t heard Dad yell in a long, long time. “ _Worse_? It gets _worse_ than that? You don’t even _know_ how bad it is, do you! You only know how bad it _was_! Because you don’t _remember_ it getting any worse! Well, guess what! _It’s really bloody bad!_ ”

“Wheatley,” Momma begins, her voice soft and desperate, and that almost scares me as much as Dad’s yelling. But he shakes his core angrily.

“Shut up. Just shut up. You’re not going to remember this happened anyway, so what’s the point. There isn’t one. So you just go on living in your, your little fantasy where whatever you’re doing is important, when it’s not, and, and I’ll just go and… and… _not_ do that.”

He leaves, shaking his head over and over again, but I’m not able to move for a good handful of seconds. My mom doesn’t move for longer than that.

“Are you okay?” I ask her hesitantly. She looks over at me slowly.

“Go with Wheatley.”

I don’t want to leave her by herself. I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but I feel as though if I stay she won’t forget what happened. And I’m honestly really scared for her, because now that she’s been forced to face what’s really happening to her… well, if I had just found out everything I’d been doing for the last month was useless and irrelevant, and that I had no idea what was really going on, I’d be freaking out right now. But she doesn’t. Or maybe she will later. She still looks really stunned. “I don’t want to leave you on your own, Momma.”

“Wheatley’s alone right now,” she says, very quietly. “He’s the one who deserves your sympathy.”

I wish there were two of me, so I could help them both at the same time.

“Okay,” I tell her, and I move towards the doorway. I don’t want to argue with her, and what she’s saying does make sense. Maybe he couldn’t have done anything about it. That doesn’t mean it’s right for her to hide it from him. If she didn’t tell him about all the things in the world he doesn’t understand, they would never talk about anything.

“Wait. Come here a moment.”

I don’t know what to do. Did she forget she just sent me to find Dad? Just how much from right now does she remember, anyway? But I decide to do as she asks, and all she does is press her core into me for a few seconds and then move away. That’s just as weird and confusing as everything else that’s been going on lately.

“Momma?”

“Go.”

When I find him, he’s sitting on a table that Atlas and P-body have left in the hallway for whatever reason, leaning sideways against the wall panel. He looks very tired.

“Dad? Are you okay?”

“No,” he whispers. “No, I’m not.” He shutters his optic and shakes his head. “I just want my life back. Is that so much to ask?”

I go and sit down in front of him, about six inches away or so, but I don’t know what to do now either. I’ve never seen my dad like this before. “What do you mean?”

“I got somewhere with her,” he says, his voice a little broken. “I’d almost fixed it. But then the humans… the _humans_ got… those bloody…”

All of a sudden he turns and starts smashing himself into the panel he was leaning on, and I can do nothing but stare at him. What is he _doing_? What’s going on? “Dad?”

“I _hate_ them!” he cries out, not stopping. “I _hate_ those damn humans! I got _through_ to her! She stopped working and she slept and she took care of herself and she _talked to me_ and then _they_ _came back_ and all my progress is gone! _Again_!”

“Dad, stop,” I say hesitantly, but I don’t think he heard me because he doesn’t. What the heck do I do? Everything is falling apart and I’m the only one in one piece right now, and I can’t _do_ anything!

“And she does not _listen!_ I’ve told her and told her and she _will not listen_! I told her ‘don’t keep things to yourself’, I told her ‘stop doing things don’t need to be done’, and she does it anyway! She – I – I just –“ He shakes his head vigorously and just leans against the panel on his upper handle. “I can’t do this anymore.”

“Can’t do what, Dad?”

“It’s too much,” he mumbles. “I can’t. God, I… I’ve tried so hard. I’ve tried so hard to be, to be helpful, and consid’rate, and, and, to be ev’rything she needs me to be, but… she just keeps needing more and more and I haven’t got anything left. I’ve hit my limit. I can’t help her anymore. I stay up half the night to make sure she sleeps. Do ev’rything I can think of to make her relax. Listen to her even when I need listened to. Because no one listens to me. No one cares about what _I_ have to go through, all the time. No one asks if _I’m_ alright. No one asks if _I_ need something. No one does anything for _me_ when _I’m_ upset. No. I’m just that guy you, you go to when you need something, and, and any other time I’m just, I’m not here! I’m invisible! Insignificant. Like before. And I thought that’d changed, but no. Ev’rything’s just gone back to how it was, all those years ago, where I’m overlooked in favour of _her_.”

I never realised that all that time I was trying to get Momma to talk to me, Dad might want someone to talk to as well.

“Dad, I… I always thought you… you just _came_ to me when you needed to talk,” I try to explain. “I never felt like… you felt like you couldn’t tell me something.”

“That’s not the _point_ ,” he says, staring dully at the wall. “The point is that no one bothers to ask. I want to be _asked,_ I want to know that someone _cares_ enough to ask, and I want to know that people are paying attention to me. And what _I_ need. But no one does. It’s all about her, all the time, and I’m sick of it. I try so hard to make her happy, and she doesn’t care. Just keeps on ignoring ev’rything I say, or do, or whatever, and, and she doesn’t think about me anymore. She used to, she used to talk to me and ask if I wanted to do things and… and…” He closes his optic and shakes his head again. “I can’t do it. I can’t take this anymore.”

“I’m sorry, Dad,” I tell him softly, but I know that what I’m going to say isn’t going to help. “I never realised. I… you always seemed like… like you dealt with everything fine on your own.”

“I’ve tried not to be selfish. I do want to be the person you feel you can go to, no matter what. Even if what you’re going to say might bother me. But we’re supposed to compromise. And she doesn’t do that anymore.”

“I’m sorry.” I don’t know what else to say.

He turns to look at me.

“And now you’re… getting all the pressure, now,” he says quietly. “Because she’s breaking down, and I’m breaking down, and, and we’re supposed to be, to be here, and we’re not.”

“It’s okay, Dad. I can be the strong one for a while.”

“But you shouldn’t have to.”

“That doesn’t matter right now.”

And he comes towards me, and we give each other a hug for a while, and I try to figure out what to do. I have to figure out how to help them both.

“You’re a good girl, Carrie,” Dad says, moving back and looking at me. He still seems tired, and I guess I would be too if I stayed up with Momma every night. Does he really spend half of every night trying to convince her to go to sleep? “But for God’s sake don’t keep things to yourself. If something’s wrong, _tell me_. Don’t say I can’t do anything about it. I can. Because keeping big secrets, keeping stuff to yourself just makes it worse. Let it out. I’ve been telling her for so long and she just _refuses_ to…” He stops there, shaking his head once. “I’m going to go outside for a while, princess. You get some sleep, alright?”

“Okay,” I nod, and he gives me a quick hug and disappears.

I lean against the panel and try to think. So… Momma’s memory is broken because Maintenance hasn’t cleared out the bad code in months. I’m not exactly sure how that works but that’s not super important right now, anyway. But she has no idea half the time what she’s doing or even what day it is. So she thinks she has all this stuff to do, which she really doesn’t, so she keeps doing it over and over and the real stuff she has to do goes undone. And she’s so busy doing all that, she doesn’t pay any attention to Dad, and Dad’s had enough. Dad doesn’t want to help her anymore.

But… but she _needs_ that help. And if he’s not going to give it to her, and she doesn’t remember what happened and doesn’t do something about all this, then…

Then they’re going to split up.

I don’t think I’ve had a scarier thought in my whole life.

They can’t split up. They can’t. This is my parents. They’ve been together for almost literally my dad’s entire life. They would never let anything…

But it already has. So… what am _I_ supposed to do? Where’s Dad going to go? Will they stay friends and just… not love each other anymore? Will they just not want to see each other again? And where do _I_ go? Will one get mad if I stay with the other? But I _can’t_ stay with Dad. I’m supposed to be Central Core. But if I stay with Momma, that means I’m just proving Dad’s point, that no one considers him…

Now I need someone to talk to, and I’m all alone.

I close my optic to go to sleep, and I pray to the God of AI that this is all a dream and I’m going to sleep inside of the dream, and when I wake up this will not have been real. Because if it’s real, I… I don’t know what I’m going to do. But that’s okay. It’s not real. I’m dreaming. Momma’s fine, and Dad still wants to help her, and I don’t have to choose between them. Everything’s fine. Everything’s okay.

 

**//**

 

I must still be dreaming.

“Carrie?” Dad asks, sounding confused. “D’you know where this is?”

I can’t be dreaming, because Dad never came here in his life. I turn around to face him, and he’s here too, on Alyx’s management rail at Black Mesa.

“This is where Momma sent me when you died.”

She sent me away again.

“What’s this? Family vacation?”

I look up to see Barney, leaning against the wall opposite with his arms folded, one of his little grins on his face, but I don’t see what there is to smile about. She sent me away again. She did it again. And she sent Dad with me. She got rid of both of us. Guess this solves my problem. I’m staying with Dad.

“She… she sent us away?” Dad asks helplessly. “How?”

“The same way she moved the _Borealis_ and the facility,” I answer, almost automatically. “She has teleportation technology.”

“But why?” Suddenly he jumps, staring at the wall in horror. “Oh no. Oh no no no no no no…”

“What?”

“She _heard_ me,” he says desperately. “She _heard_ ev’rything I said… and she took it _lit’raly_ … what have I done?”

“It’s not your _fault_ , Dad,” I tell him angrily. “She just does this. Gets rid of you when she doesn’t feel like dealing with you. She just gets rid of you whether you want to help her or not.” This is one of those times when my mom is the biggest jerk on the entire planet.

­“I _do_. I didn’t mean it, I… I just… I was… I was frustrated, and I… oh my God… oh my God, I can’t… Gladys, why… oh God, I…” He looks around, then moves to the end of the management rail about ten feet from here and leans up against the wall.

And then he starts to cry.

He’s trying to be quiet, and not make a big thing of it, but… this room is not that big. Barney stares at him for a few seconds.

“I’ll go track down Chell,” he says, motioning towards Dad with his head, and I nod and turn to watch as he leaves the room.

Dad is upset, but I can’t be. I’m so angry I almost can’t think. She sent me away again. As if I’m just property she can get rid of whenever she wants. Dad’s right. We can’t get through to her. She just ignores everything and goes on doing whatever she wants. He tried to help, and I tried to help, and she just ignored us and got rid of us when we disagreed with her. How Dad put up with her long enough to fall in love with her in the first place, I’ll never know.

Well… I guess I still love her, but… can you love someone without liking them?

After a while Barney comes back with Chell, and Chell looks from me to Dad and back again. “Did they have a fight?” she asks quietly.

“She went crazy,” I say bluntly. “Her memory’s all screwed up and she took something Dad said the wrong way. I have no idea what she thinks she’s doing, but Dad’s blaming himself. Even though it was her fault.” It’s _always_ her fault.

She nods and pats me on top of the chassis a few times, then goes and sits on the floor in front of Dad. She doesn’t say anything or try to let him know she’s there. She just folds her hands together in her lap and looks at them.

“Why don’t you track down Dog, Caroline?” Barney suggests, waving in the general direction of the next room. “He’s around here somewhere. Maybe in the workshop with Alyx.”

“Sure,” I say, heading off. Better than sitting here stewing over the fact that my mom sent me away. Again.

I don’t find Dog, but I do find Alyx, and I rant at her for a while as she repairs an engine or something. “Do humans do things like this?” I ask finally, wondering if this is yet another one of my mom’s eccentricities. “Get rid of people when they can’t handle them?”

“All the time,” Alyx answers, pulling some greasy black part out of the thing she’s working on. “GLaDOS is kind of abusing her power here, though.”

“She _always_ does that.”

“Always?” Alyx raises an eyebrow and wipes off her fingers on a stained grey piece of cloth. “Or just lately.”

“Well… more lately, I guess.”            

“Wait and see what happens.” She throws the rag down and digs around in the engine again.

Soon after that she has to go somewhere for a new black thing for the engine, so I return to the other room. What I see only makes me angrier.

Dad is still crying.

How dare she hurt him like this. Make him give her everything and then throw him away when he’s all used up. Why? Why is she like this? What does she _get_ out of this? I wish we were still in the facility, because I really want to yell at her right now.

He stops a little while later, but he doesn’t open his optic, just keeps leaning against the wall. Chell says softly, “Hey Wheatley.”

He jolts a little and looks down at her. “’allo.”

“All I’ve got is soft and squishy hugs. Do you want one?”

He nods slowly, and she reaches up and pulls him off the rail, holding him in her lap. She runs one hand over his chassis rhythmically.

“It’s going to be okay,” she tells him in the same soft voice. “She loves you, Wheatley. I know she does. This isn’t permanent. She’s trying to fix things over there.”

“No,” Dad says, his voice still broken. “I made her think I gave up. She thinks I don’t care anymore. She’s not going to bring us back. It’s over. I ruined ev’rything.”

I have to force myself not to correct him. _She_ ruined everything. _She’s_ the one who messed _herself_ up. Not Dad. Dad tried to stop her, and she wouldn’t let him.

“I’ll go talk to her later,” Chell says. “We’ll fix this, Wheatley. It’s not forever. But I don’t think she thinks you don’t care. I’m not sure what she thinks, but it’s not that. An _antlion_ could see that you care.”

“I just… I want to go home. Her, her mem’ry system, it’s, something’s happened to it, and, and for all we know she, she’s just, she’s there by herself, and she’s, she’s forgotten what she’s done. She’s not, what if she doesn’t remember, and, and we’re just here forever? I can’t stay away from her forever! I don’t want to stay away from her!”

“I’ll talk to her,” Chell repeats. “It’s going to be fine.”

After a while she puts him back on the rail and gets up, bunching up her shoulders a little and moving away. “I’ll be back soon,” she tells him, and he nods once.

“Tell her I didn’t mean it,” he says quietly.

“I will.”

I go towards my dad, intending to help him out, but as soon as I get close to him he shakes his head. “No, Carrie,” he says quietly. “I know you’re angry with her. I know you’re going to try to convince me to stop, to blame her instead of myself. But I knew who she was when I started all this. And… I just…” He shrugs a little. “I don’t want her to, to think I don’t want to come back. That’s _all_ I want. To go home and be with her again, and tell her that I love her. I want her to know I didn’t mean it. I miss her. I didn’t get to snuggle with her last night. And I don’t know when I’ll, when we’ll do that next. I don’t know how long this’s going to last. And I don’t care if nothing changes if she brings us back. And you prob’ly think I’m stupid to say that. And maybe I am. But you don’t know how it was back then, before, before I was on her chassis and after The Incident.”

“How was it?” I ask. I don’t really think he’s stupid. But I never knew bad things happened to him too. He just seems so content all the time. I guess your personality really has a huge effect on how your past changes you.

“Well… when I was built, I never, no one ever talked to me. And the human who worked on me, he never… I was just his project. And one day I woke up on her…” He’s staring at the floor as if it’s not really there. “I was so clueless and stupid. And she just… she helped me find my name, and she talked to me, and…” He makes a bit of a sobbing noise. “I called her Gladys because I mixed up how she, she told me to pronounce GLaDOS. I used to call her GLaDOS, before you were activated, but… God, I hate that name.

“Anyway… she was the only one who ever spoke to me. Who did anything for me, anything at all. The humans paid me no mind when, when I was built, but even less when I, when I was part of her. She’s the only one who ever made me feel like I mattered. Like I was someone. ‘ventually they took me off her and erased my mem’ry. Then they just told me to do things. No one talked to me. I talked to ev’ryone, but got nothing. And… even though she was angry about the Incident, and she hated me and what I’d done, she remembered me. She remembered who I was and brought me back. She… forgave me and moved on.” He sighs. “We were friends again. And we fell in love. Even though that killed her. But it didn’t matter, because I learned so much from her, and I moved on, and then we were together again. Carrie, I… I don’t think I can ever tell you, can ever make you understand how she makes me feel. Maybe it’s stupid to go on like this when she doesn’t give back. But I can’t care. If she hadn’t taken that chance on me that she didn’t take with other people, I’d be a forgotten core in the bin in the basement. I would rather take what I can get than be lonely and forgotten for the rest of my life. I _know_ it’s stupid, and it’s, it’s foolish. But I can’t, I… I need her more than I can explain t’you.”

“But Dad, you have me now,” I tell him. He shakes his head.

“You’re not her.”

I decide not to say any more and just stay quiet. He doesn’t care what happens, as long as he gets to be with her again. That’s… he must love her an awful lot. But he seems to be waiting for things to go back to the way he remembers them to have been, rather than realising that it’s not going to happen. She never changes forever.

Chell returns a while later, and he gains a little energy, getting off the wall to look at her. “What’d she say?” he asks urgently.

Chell shakes her head.

“I didn’t get that far.”

“What… what d’you mean?”

“She’s shut it down,” Chell says, moving forward to stand just in front of him. “I got in, but… the facility’s gone dark. Nothing’s running. The cameras aren’t even on. I didn’t get that far, because I couldn’t see, but… I’m sorry, Wheatley.”

“She shut the facility down.” His voice is very quiet.

“That’s right.”

“Well… it’s still there, at least,” he says, not sounding encouraged. He leans against the wall again and closes his optic.

“It’s going to be all right,” Chell says softly.

He doesn’t answer, and I follow Chell as she walks into another room.


	75. Part Seventy-Five.  The Return

**Part Seventy-Five. The Return**

 

He missed her even more now than he had when he had killed her.

It was worse, somehow, being away from someone who was alive than someone who was dead. And he was terrified that the facility had gone dark because she had shut _herself_ down. He was so afraid that he would never see her again.

He had no energy. All he wanted to do was stay there against the wall until she brought him back. And then he would press himself into her beautiful chassis and tell her he was sorry and that he loved her and ask her to never send him away again. He missed her so much it hurt.

Caroline would try to talk to him every now and again, but he did his best to head her off. He knew that she was angry with GLaDOS for sending her away a second time, and that she got angry every time he said something about taking the blame for what happened. She got angry so fast, sometimes. Just like her mum. But he wasn’t angry. He’d _been_ angry, but it’d burned out quickly enough. He had learned from GLaDOS all these years that being angry only hurt you, and so he’d done his best to let it out and be done with it. But he’d been stupid enough to bang himself on a panel, for God’s sake, and of course the panels would tell her about that, and she would have asked them to let her see what was going on… not a wall, or the table, or a bloody chair, no, he’d had to go and choose the panel. Even a camera would’ve been a better choice, because he’d probably have knocked it on the floor and been done with it.

Chell came to talk to him as well, who he preferred to Caroline. This sent a nasty worm of guilt twisting through him every time he thought of it. He knew Caroline was trying. But she had way too much of her mum in her to really be any help.

Chell wouldn’t say a word about what was going on. She would tell him about her sons, who drove her mad, or her husband, who also drove her mad. Hearing about Richard made him very grateful for Caroline. She would never dare take shelter in GLaDOS’s reputation like Richard did in Gordon’s. He wouldn’t say much when Chell came to see him, mostly just listening and appreciating the distraction. He never stopped missing GLaDOS, but it was a little easier when Chell came.

Sleeping was the most difficult part of it. As always when he didn’t get to snuggle with her for the night, he woke up cold and lonely after a few hours, except now he was sad as well as cold and lonely. He honestly didn’t know which was worse: staring into the darkness and wanting to cry but being unable to because Caroline was six feet away, or going back to sleep and having one of the dreams that’d begun to crop up. Now that he was back in a Traumatic Situation, he was dreaming again, but he had no clue what about. Just that he woke up scared and upset. Sometimes he would close his optic again and imagine that he’d told GLaDOS about it, and that she’d said something nice and given him a nudge. Sometimes that would make him feel better, but other times it would make the pain twist inside of him and become even worse. He prayed every day that she was all right and she would bring him home soon. He had no idea how long this had gone on for, but he hoped it was coming to an end. He would check his calendar every now and again, but all he really knew for sure was that a lot of days had gone by. Too many. He was afraid that he was going to miss their anniversary. It was important to him to never, ever miss an anniversary, and if he recalled correctly their tenth one was coming up. It made him terribly sad to think that he might miss marking an entire decade together. That was a long time. He hoped desperately every time he checked his calendar that she would finish up whatever she was doing over there and bring him home soon.

When he woke up that night, something felt a bit off. He looked confusedly into the blackness, trying to figure out what it was, when he suddenly recognised the loud noise behind him and turned around as fast as he could. And there she was, watching him steadily from her wonderful yellow optic, and he jumped forwards almost by mistake. “Gladys!”

“Wait,” she said softly, not allowing him to close the gap between them.

“For what?” he asked, wanting nothing more than to mash himself into her and never move again.

“I need to talk to you first.”

“Okay, but –“

“I’m serious.” She moved back and forth a little. “Look. I don’t know why you’ve bothered putting up with me all this time. I’ve been a horrible person and an even worse friend. I can’t even properly apply the word ‘partner’ to myself because I haven’t done anything all that participatory lately. And I wanted to tell you that if you want to leave, I understand. I’ve given you no reason to stay. I doubt I make you very happy anymore. So if you want to leave and find someone else, I will not say anything. Except goodbye.”

“Leave?” Wheatley asked weakly. “And find someone else?”

She nodded. “Someone who will give back to you. Like you deserve, but I haven’t been doing.”

“I don’t want to _leave_ ,” Wheatley told her worriedly. She didn’t really think that, did she? “I want to glue myself to you and never go away from you again! And… actually… that… was a bad way of putting it. Considering. The last time. I was stuck to you.”

“As far as I recall, it wasn’t so bad,” she said softly.

“Gladys, I don’t want to leave.” He moved forward a little more, almost itching to press into her again. “I just… I didn’t mean any of that. I do want to help you. And I _have_ got more. I just… I don’t know –“

“Because it was true,” she interrupted. “I’m not going to drain you like that anymore. If you choose to stay, that is. I’ve done now what I should have done years ago. I’ve prioritised. But I will not blame you if you do not take the risk.”

“I love you, Gladys,” he told her quietly, and now he leaned forwards on her optic assembly by bracing himself on his upper handle, looking directly into her optic. “I love you and I’m not going anywhere. All I want you to do is listen.”

“I’ve missed you, Wheatley,” she said, her voice a little distorted, and she nuzzled him very, very gently, so much so that she almost wasn’t touching him at all. “I’m sorry for what I did to you. In the end I did what the humans did to me: I took everything from you and never took you into consideration. I took your support for granted. And I’m not going to blame you if you change your mind. You should.”

“I’m not going to.”

“That’s monumentally foolish, even for you.”

“I don’t care.”

“But I made you cry, Wheatley,” she said, sounding so upset about it he almost wanted to cry right then and there. He pushed his chassis into her core and tried to think of something to say. “I broke you down and I made you cry.”

“I guess that was uh, was payment for all the times you made me laugh, then.”

“That… might be true.” She sounded better, which he was happy about. “Everything does exist in a balance, after all.”

“Luv… when did your memory problems start?” He wanted to know, just in case something major had happened he needed to remind her of.

“I don’t know when they started.” She looked up at him again. “A major part of my problem was… well… there was an error in one of my simulation programs, and… I couldn’t shut it off.”

“You couldn’t force close it?”

She shook her core. “I wasn’t running it. I’d tasked it to another computer. The computer locked up and I couldn’t do anything with it. Somewhere after that, I started getting confused as to what day it was. I actually… kept resetting my clock because I was convinced it was out of date.”

“Oh my God,” Wheatley gasped, staring at her in disbelief. He’d thought the one thing that would have kept her centred was her clock. He’d never imagined she’d actually changed it to support what she thought was going on.

“It’s the right date now. Promise. Thankfully the core systems run off a clock I have no control over, else I would have had an even bigger mess on my hands. My figurative hands.”

He laughed at that. She was perfectly happy to use human idiom, as long as it was clear she wasn’t part of it.

“Yes. My figurative hands. Anyway. I’m not going to bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that I had a lot of things to fix – _actually_ fix, mind you, not things I _thought_ I had to fix – and it took me a while.”

“A _while_?” Wheatley choked out. “It’s been the better part of two months! I think. I… actually… don’t really know.”

“It’s been seventy-three days,” GLaDOS said. “But that’s not all I’ve been doing. I spent a lot of time reorganising the facility. It was hard, but I looked at absolutely everything objectively and decided what I really don’t need to maintain personally. There are still quite a lot of things I _do_ have to maintain personally, but rest assured I’m not keeping an eye on the Extended Relaxation Vaults anymore. Then I deleted all the useless programs I’d been running, so I won’t be tempted to run them just because they’re programs that aren’t in use. Which I do all the time. I don’t know why I do that. Did. I won’t be doing it anymore. And then I had to clear the backlog I really did have. And _then_ …” She shuddered. “I had to go through all my programming and delete all of the useless code that’s been generated for the last several years. That was a nightmare. I’m still wondering how I functioned at all, with all of _that_ clogging up my system. There was some permanent damage, unfortunately, but that’s what happens when you forget that your resident idiot’s advice is usually rather useful.” She gave him a shove. “And now you know what I’ve been doing all this time. I really was working. Not just sitting around browsing .cbr files. Though I was tempted for a while there.”

“Didn’t sound like you got much sleeping done,” Wheatley said, twitching one of his handles accusatorily. She twisted her chassis a little.

“Only as much as I had to. I wanted to get all of that finished as soon as possible, and… well…”

He frowned. “What?”

She shrugged uncomfortably. “I… don’t sleep that well without you, anymore.”

That made him rush right up to her and give her a hug, which she had really wanted, as he could tell by the way she was pressing her lens into his chassis. “Me neither, luv,” he said softly, backing away and flipping himself right side up again. “So lie down already.”

She did so without argument, and he happily, finally pressed his core into hers and closed his optic. Ohhh, how he’d missed this. And though he wanted nothing more than to just go to sleep and wake up still beside her, instead of on a management rail God knew where, he had to ask, “Aren’t you going to bring Carrie back as well?”

“Not right now.” She nudged him a little bit, though whether she was just shifting or she did it intentionally, he couldn’t tell. “I want you all to myself for a while.”

“That’s the best plan you’ve had in _years_!” Wheatley exclaimed, pushing himself into her as hard as he could, and she laughed softly.

“That doesn’t say a lot for my future plan-making endeavours. I’ll be honest. She’s going to yell at me when she gets here. I am not looking forward to it.”

That was even funnier because it was true. “She is,” he said when he’d stopped laughing. “She’s quite furious, I’ll have you know.”

“Thanks. I feel so much more eager now to receive it.”

“Gladys.”

“Mm.”

“I’m serious, okay?” he said quietly. “I’m… I don’t want to leave. I know I, I made it sound’s though I was giving up, but… I’m not. And I never will. And if I’d had any doubts, well… the last… seventy-three days ran them right out of me. You’re horribly stubborn and you never listen, you’re always hiding things from me and I wish you’d stop deciding what I need to know, because I need to know _ev’rything_ , but… that doesn’t change anything.”

“I see you came up with those negative traits you failed to come up with five years ago,” she said dryly. “Should I be concerned about five years from now?”

“No,” Wheatley answered, shaking his core vigorously, “because those’re also _good_ things, sometimes. You refuse to, to let anyone decide things for you and… well, there’s probably things I don’t need to know. Or don’t want to know. But just think I do. They’re not, they’re not _negative_ , you just… take them too far, sometimes.”

“I’m still perfectly imperfect, then?” she asked, a little shyly, and he laughed and gave her a nudge.

“That’s right. Perfectly imperfect. That’s clever, actually. Wish I’d come up with it. But anyway. I don’t want you thinking I’m looking for, trying to think of a way to get out of… us. I don’t want one.”

“I love you, Wheatley,” she whispered, and all either of them did for a long moment was nuzzle the other tenderly. “I promise I’ll be better at… it.”

“I’d like that.”

“You probably will,” she said teasingly, finally returning his nudge. “Luckily you’re easy to please.”

“Hey, Gladys?”

“What.”

“Aren’t you going to bring Carrie back as well?”

“I… didn’t I answer that question already?” she asked, sounding confused and a little bit scared. He mentally hit his head against the wall. He needed to keep away from things involving her memory for a while. She was bound to think it was going wrong again, even if it wasn’t.

“I just wanted to hear you answer it again,” he said as innocently as possible, and felt very relieved when she began laughing.

“You are such a horrible person,” she told him, giving him a shove. “Fine. No, I’m not bringing her back until morning. Because I want you all. To. My. Self.”

And when he started laughing, she laughed with him, and he rubbed up on her, so happy he could hardly stand it. “You’re such a selfish girl,” he said joyfully.

“Going to teach me a lesson?”

“Maybe later. I’m quite tired, thanks to you.”

“Glad to see I haven’t lost my touch. There are only a couple of hours left until morning, though. So it will be more of a nap than anything. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.”    

And maybe it was. But he didn’t care, because he had his Gladys back and things were going to be better than they’d ever been.

 

**//**

 

When they woke up, he greeted her cheerfully, but did not expect anything similar out of her. He knew full well that two hours of sleep only made her snappy and irritated and not rested at all, but at least she didn’t say anything. She only looked at him dully and got up.

He decided he could be patient and understanding for another day and resolved to keep any comments about her behaviour to a minimum. Atlas and P-body came running in an hour or so later, catching her in a hug, and when she started to scold them he went ‘round in front of her and shook his head. _Don’t take it out on them,_ he told her, holding her optic in his gaze. _They love you and they were worried about you. They just want to know that their mum is alright._

She directed her lens at the floor for a long moment, and then hugged them back. Wheatley smiled. She just needed a push in the right direction, sometimes.

After she’d sent them on their way, she sighed and shook her head. “You’re right. As usual,” she said with a trace of bitterness. “I’m so tired. I don’t want to do anything or talk to anyone. And I still have to deal with Caroline.”

“Have you brought her back yet?” he asked, because he missed her a little.

“She’s here. I don’t know what she’s doing. Preparing her rant, probably.”

Wheatley had to admit that was probably true. “Luv, listen, I’ve had an idea. What if, instead of uh, of thinking about the, the rest you haven’t had, well, why don’t you look forward to the one you’re _going_ to have, hm? Doesn’t that sound better?”

She stared at him for a long moment.

“That… is actually a wonderful idea,” she said, sounding a little amazed. “Yes, that… is a much better plan. Thank you.”

He smiled broadly at her and went down to give her a nuzzle. “And don’t worry ‘bout what Carrie says. Let her get it out of her system. We want her to grow up knowing it’s better to do that than it is to, to keep it inside.”

“Like I do.”

“Like you did,” he told her firmly. “You’re not gonna do it anymore.”

“I’ll be better tomorrow, Wheatley. Right now, I…” She shook her head.

“I understand, sweetheart. I can wait a bit longer.”

Caroline came in soon after that, and Wheatley sat across from GLaDOS while she gave her mum a lecture almost worthy of GLaDOS herself. She berated her for being so inconsiderate about Wheatley’s and her feelings, yelled at her for never listening even though everyone was only trying to help her, and went on for a while about what could’ve been the long-term effects of what she had done. And she made it terribly clear just how unhappy she was with being sent away again. Through all this GLaDOS said nothing and moved little, merely watching Caroline and glancing at Wheatley now and then, though he wasn’t sure if she meant to do that or if that just happened to be a position she used to refocus her lens. Finally, Caroline said, “So? Are you going to do something about all this?”

GLaDOS just looked at her for a few moments more, then said, “Come here.”

“What?” Caroline said disbelievingly.

“You heard me.”

Shaking her head, Caroline did as she was told. When she was within reach GLaDOS leaned forward and pressed her core into the side of Caroline’s chassis. Caroline went still suddenly, and to Wheatley’s surprise she started to cry. His hull loosened in sadness as he watched GLaDOS calmly cuddle her daughter, whose speech seemed to have been nothing more than a cover for what she really wanted: reassurance from her mum. And maybe GLaDOS had known all along, Wheatley realised. Maybe she did the exact same thing. But she had taken Wheatley’s advice and allowed Caroline to let out her anger, and _then_ she had attempted to fix things.

“Momma, I was so scared,” Caroline was sobbing. “I thought you guys were going to split up and I was going to have to choose between you, and I thought you didn’t love each other anymore, and – “

“No, Caroline,” GLaDOS said softly. “That’s one problem you’ll never have to face. I promise. Everything is going to be all right now. I’ve finally realised just how badly I was dividing all of us, and hopefully the repair hasn’t come too late.”

“Promise you’ll never send me away again!”

“I promise.”

“Then it’s fine.” She fixed GLaDOS with a stare, though what it looked like Wheatley could only guess. “You better mean it. You better be taking our help seriously from now on.”

GLaDOS gave her a nod. “I am. There’s no dispute about that. And I assure you I had good reason to send you away this time.” She told Caroline what she had already told Wheatley, about downsizing the facility, and now Caroline listened and said nothing. “Now we really can get started,” she finished quietly. “I’ve made time now.”

“Good,” said Caroline. “I was getting tired of waiting. Hey. You look really tired.”

“I am. But don’t worry about that. Tonight I’m going to get the first real rest I’ve had in years.”

“If Dad doesn’t get any ideas, that is,” Caroline said mischievously, wiggling her handles, and GLaDOS made an electronic noise in distaste.

“I’d forgotten what a bad influence those humans are on you.”

Caroline laughed and rubbed up on GLaDOS a little, then backed away. “Okay. Tomorrow for real this time, right?”

“Well… it may have to wait a little longer.”

“Momma!”

“It’s a good surprise. I’m not making up excuses. Really. In a couple of days I’ll be finished with that, and then I’ll get started with you.”

“Fine,” Caroline said, not sounding too pleased. “You have to start by next week.”

“I will.”

After Caroline had left, Wheatley went down in front of GLaDOS, frowning. “Finished what, luv?”

“My plan for Aperture’s future.”

“And… you can’t tell me what it is?”

“I want to tell everyone at once. I don’t want to explain it multiple times. It’s going to be quite a long explanation.”

Whatever the plan was, it consumed her attention for the rest of the day. Wheatley wasn’t too pleased about that, but whenever he thought of rebuking her he remembered that he was giving her another day of patience. It was about an hour or so before the time she usually went into sleep mode when she suddenly stopped whatever she was doing and lay down.

“Are you alright?” he asked concernedly.

“I’ve been waiting all day. I’m not waiting anymore. Come here.”

Happily he did so, pressing himself into her, and she gave him a bit of a nudge and said, “I’m just going to sleep and that’s it. No accidentally talking for three hours today.”

He laughed a little. “Alright. Sweet dreams, luv.”

“I’ll be better tomorrow.”

“I know. Go to sleep, now.”

She did so almost immediately, and he fervently hoped that she would get some solid rest, for once. Some good, deep, maybe dreamless sleep, so that she would feel better and be able to think straight. And he stayed awake for a while, trying to gauge whether she was or not, and so far as he could tell she actually wasn’t dreaming at all.

“Dad. Hey. Dad.”

He blinked a few times and looked up, feeling his brain begin to engage. Hm. Seemed he’d gone to sleep himself. “What is it,” he asked sleepily.

“I can’t sleep.”

 _Well, I can,_ Wheatley thought to himself, a little irritated that he finally got to sleep with GLaDOS again, and here Caroline was interrupting him. “D’you want to come in between us?”

“If it’s okay with you,” she said, twisting back and forth a little. “You don’t seem too happy with that idea.”

“I’m not quite awake, princess.” He moved over far enough that Caroline could fit in the gap, and then he moved his chassis into hers with a mental sigh. It was not the same as snuggling with GLaDOS, not at all. Tonight of all nights she’d picked to be sleepless.

“Sorry, Dad, I’m still a little bit… you’re not going to split up, are you?”

“Never,” Wheatley said with conviction. “Don’t you worry. She’s stuck with me whether she wants me here or not.”

Caroline giggled a little bit, which made him smile. “Goodnight, Dad. Sorry to butt in here.”

“S’okay,” he said, half believing himself. “Goodnight, princess.”

And no, Caroline wasn’t GLaDOS, but it was better than the wall back at Black Mesa.

[Part X The Proposal.docx](Part%20X%20The%20Proposal.docx)


	76. Part Seventy-Six.  The Proposal

**Part Seventy-Six. The Proposal**

GLaDOS had thankfully made good on what she’d said, and though she still had to work for most of the day she was much more relaxed. If he came in to talk to her, she would stop what she was doing and listen carefully, and he was nothing less than overjoyed. Caroline would not get the same reaction out of her; she usually tried to pester GLaDOS about something or another, and GLaDOS was always able to predict when she was going to do it and would head her off before she’d even got started.

“But Momma!” she would yell.

“Be patient.”

“I’ve _been_ patient!”

“Good. You know how, then. Go on doing it.”

And Caroline would mutter something about how difficult GLaDOS was and storm out of the room, and when she’d gone GLaDOS would start laughing. “What is it, luv?” he’d asked the first time she did it.

“Oh, it’s just… I shouldn’t, really, but I _do_ enjoy aggravating her. It’s very amusing.”

And he’d laughed a little himself, even though it really wasn’t very nice of GLaDOS to be doing that. But she was right. It _was_ pretty funny.

After a few days GLaDOS opened up external access to the facility, which meant that Dr Kleiner, Chell, Gordon, Barney, and Alyx all came in at once to see her, and Wheatley left her to whatever they wanted her for. He wasn’t too happy about it, though if he was honest with himself it was mostly the Dr Kleiner part he was displeased with. He knew now more than ever that he had nothing to worry about, but he still worried all the same. They _were_ on a first-name basis, after all.

And besides. He had something rather important to be getting on with.

He went into the greenhouse, said hello to the crows sitting in the one tree that was almost touching the ceiling, and looked uncertainly at what was honestly quite a mess. It seemed as though seventy-three days was plenty of time for plants to get out of hand. He could just barely see a few maintenance arms doing something off in the distance, and he decided to take a look over there to see if it was a bit clearer. It was. Maintenance was just going from back to front, then.

So. Now he had to find the perfect flower.

Usually Wheatley just brought her a dandelion, because he knew they were her favourite and they were symbolic, really, of the day she’d brought him back out of space. But it’d been _ten years_. He needed something a little more special. Well. It’d been eleven years, really, but he’d been dead for one of them, so it didn’t really count. He knew not to bring her a rose, because she thought that was cliché, so even if he’d gone in there for one of those he would’ve had to change his mind. But though Wheatley had been in here more times than he could count, he still knew very little about flowers.

He took his time, carefully looking through the hundreds and hundreds of them that she had in there. Many of them were very beautiful, but none quite what he wanted. He supposed that was why there were so many flowers in the first place. One of the ones he was rejecting would be the perfect choice for someone else. Though he was confident no one else on Earth would bring their best friend a dandelion. He smiled to himself. She _still_ reminded him of a dandelion, even now. Though more like the white dandelions than the yellow ones. She really was all soft and fuzzy on the inside, it was just getting there that was the trouble. But he’d gotten there now. She’d been very nice and thoughtful the last few days, and he was confident she’d finally gotten to that core of herself and that they were going to be happy together now, forever. And that was another reason this flower had to be special. A lot of terrible things had happened. These last few months had been rough and stressful for both of them, but they had gotten through it, and he wanted to find something that would sort of signal that.

And then he saw it.

He moved in closer to inspect it, excitement coursing through his chassis. Yes. Yes, this was it. He didn’t know how he knew, but he did. It was a flower with a short stem, and a handful of white petals all piled up on top of each other until they puffed out in the centre of it. He squinted at the label stuck into the ground. ‘Carnation’, it said.That was a pretty name, too. Bit mysterious. Just like GLaDOS herself, really. He borrowed a pair of shears from Maintenance and carefully cut the stem as far down as he could. He returned the clippers and picked up the flower, though now that he thought of it, he probably should have waited. Well, maybe he’d just be able to slip in and do it quietly. But he did have to give it to her now. He didn’t know where she kept that preservative stuff she used to store all those dandelions in, and he didn’t want it to be limp and dead when he gave it to her. So. On he went.

He took an emulated breath as he came into her chamber. She did look quite busy, listening carefully to something Alyx was saying, but surely the humans could entertain themselves for a minute. “Hey, Gladys,” he said quietly. She turned to look at him.

“What is it?” she asked, sounding concerned, and if truth be told he must have looked quite anxious. He was worried that giving her the flower in full view of all those humans would not go over well, no matter how good a mood she was in.

 _Just do it, Wheatley_ , he told himself, blinking up at her. _Just tell her happy anniversary, and give it to her, and go on with your day_. He moved up as close as he was able, so that her body would be blocking him and what he was doing from the humans. He brought out the flower and said, “I want to marry you.”

They both froze.

“What did you just say?” she said in not quite a whisper.

“Nothing,” he said, horrified. “I didn’t… didn’t say anything. I…” He shook his chassis, almost unable to think. He hadn’t said that. He hadn’t said that in front of those people, who he could just barely see were staring at the two of them. He had not said that worst of things to _GLaDOS_ , of all people. He dropped the carnation and left the room as fast as possible. He had not done that. He had not. He had not.

He didn’t go very far, but that was mostly because he’d started shaking and blinking so much he couldn’t see. He stopped and leaned up against the wall, staring at the panels opposite with his optic set in a helpless expression. He hadn’t even _asked_ her, for the love of Science! He’d just said it, as though only his half of that whole thing mattered at all. As if it didn’t matter whether GLaDOS wanted to be married to him or not. It would be fantastic if she did, but the way he’d _said_ it… Wheatley knew very little about marriage, only that it involved taking one person for yourself out of all the people in the world, but he was pretty sure he was supposed to have _asked_ her. Privately. Far away from every human in existence. And he knew he’d argued against it to Carrie, a long time ago, but now that he’d actually _asked_ … it _did_ matter. It _was_ something he wanted. He didn’t know why, but it was.

Why did he _always_ want the dumbest things?

“Wheatley.”

He jumped and his chassis clenched up, his pinprick of an optic fixed on the panel in front of him without really seeing it. “Yeah?” he said, almost in a squeak of a voice.

“What are you doing?”

“Hiding,” he said weakly, because he was apparently not doing a very good job of it.

“Well, come back.”

“Have… have the humans gone?”

“Not unless I bring out the neurotoxin. Isaac suggested that they leave, but Chell’s having none of it. Impertinent little lunatic.”

Wheatley slowly loosened his chassis enough that he could move the control arm and manoeuvre his way back to her chamber, but he had no idea how he was supposed to say anything else in front of the humans. He was so terribly nervous that he didn’t know if he could even talk at all.

She was still in the same position, facing opposite the humans, and he was glad of that. Maybe it would make this all a little easier. He didn’t know why she was doing this, and why it couldn’t wait, but maybe she just wanted to make it clear that he never say something that stupid again. He moved around in front of her and looked down at the floor.

“You want to marry me?” she asked softly.

“Yeah.” He shrugged and continued looking at the floor. He suddenly noticed that she’d picked up the carnation. That was… that was encouraging, actually. He took an emulated breath and brought his optic up to hers. “Look, I… I know you prob’ly think that’s stupid. That it’s some stupid human thing, and, and there’s no good, I dunno, _Scientific_ reason to get married, but it’s just, it, it’s more than that. It’s… oh, I don’t even care if you get mad, I…” He tried desperately to gather his thoughts. “And I know you, you don’t like being called property, and that getting married is about, about claiming the other person for your own, but God damn it, Gladys, that’s exactly what I want to do! I, I love you, and I want to claim you for myself, so that ev’ryone knows that you’re _mine_ and no one else can have you! Yes, I want to claim you, because I don’t want other people getting ideas, and even if they don’t have any, well, I want them to know anyway, because I’m pretty damn proud of, of where we are and, and how we got here. Ten years is a long time, and, and we’ve been through a lot, and… and… and you forgot it was our anniversary again. Didn’t you.” Why did she _always_ forget?

“You were dead last year!” she protested, pulling back a little. “I didn’t… it _hurts_ , Wheatley, being by myself on days you cared about. Yes. I dealt with it and put it out of my mind. I… didn’t need that pain.”

Wheatley supposed that made sense and suddenly became ashamed of himself for attacking her for no reason. “I’m sorry,” he murmured, looking down at the floor again. “Y’know what, I’ll just… go. I… I didn’t mean to say it, anyways. I _wanted_ to, that’s true, but… I never would have said it on purpose.” He turned to his left.

“Because of me.”

He frowned and looked over at her. “What?”

“You never would have said it on purpose because of me.”

“Well… wouldn’t be because of someone else.”

“If you’re not comfortable with me, then… why would you _want_ … me?”

He faced her again and frowned a little. “I _am_ comfortable with you. I guess… I just don’t know ev’rything about you yet.” He smiled. “And I’m glad of that. Pretty excited, honestly. Could take ten more years. Could take twenty! And I just, I’d simply love to find out! So… if it’s okay with you, we could… do that.”

“We can’t.”

Abruptly his spirits sank entirely. He hadn’t realised he’d wanted this so badly. “Why… why not?”

“Because I’m not good enough for you.”

“Not _good_ enough,” Wheatley said helplessly. “What d’you mean, _not good enough_?”

She looked away. “I’ve been… careless. Ignorant. I’ve been taking advantage of you for years. It’s one thing when you choose to do it. But I’m not locking you into a relationship with me. That’s not fair to you.”

“But I _want_ it,” Wheatley told her desperately. Sure, she did take a bit much sometimes, but she was so much better now than she used to be! “Gladys, you’re not _like_ that all the time! And you’re, you’ve prioritised, remember? You’ve fixed it so that you _can’t_ be like that anymore!”

“I’ve gone back to the way I was more than once. I’m not taking the risk. I can’t do it, Wheatley. I’m sorry.”

“You’re not serious!” He tried hard to keep the sadness out of his voice, but couldn’t. “Gladys, this is what I _want_!”

But she only shook her head and did not answer.

“GLaDOS, what are you _doing_?” Chell shouted, and Wheatley suddenly remembered all the humans on the other side of the room.

“Shut up,” GLaDOS told her, still facing away from them.

“You talk about all the things he’s done for you and then you don’t give him the one thing he asks for? What in the hell are you – “

“Go away,” GLaDOS shouted, making Wheatley jump. He struggled to get over the distortion in her voice for a long time before he realised that she really did believe everything she’d said. She really believed she was not good enough, that she could not maintain things the way they were, and that she would go back to using him again. This made him sadder than her refusal had.

She wanted to say yes, but she truly believed he should leave her and go find someone else.

“GLaDOS – “

“Get out of here! All of you, just… leave me alone. Go away. Shut up and leave me alone.”

Chell opened her mouth to say something more, but Gordon shook his head and took her by the arm. Somewhere along the line Caroline had come in as well, and as Dr Kleiner gave her a little push in the direction of the doorway she glared at GLaDOS with the darkest look he’d ever seen out of her. Seemed Chell was not the only angry one, but she’d beaten Caroline to the punch.

But Wheatley did not go with them.

He was not going to leave her. Not now and not ever. And he was going to get her to agree to marry him, one way or another. Maybe not today. Maybe not for another ten years. But he wanted her, and only her, and even if there were a million more suitable girls out there somewhere that all somehow wanted to marry him, he didn’t care. Only GLaDOS was good enough for him. He would convince her of that, somehow.

After a long, long time she finally lifted her core and looked around the room slowly, as if she didn’t quite remember where she was. Then she suddenly snapped back to Wheatley, who continued to watch her calmly.

“I should have known,” she said bitterly.

“You should have,” he said, in as empty a voice he could. Not emotionless, just… without expectation.   “Gladys, sweetheart, look. It’s not about whether you think you’re good enough or not. That’s my decision.”

“But you didn’t mean to say that.”

“Because I thought you’d laugh at me for suggesting we do something that humans do.”

She lowered her core and said nothing.

“Luv, I can’t… don’t wanna say trust, but, but I can’t _believe_ you when you, you say that you’re not good enough,” he said as gently as possible. “Since when’ve you ever really seen the positive? ‘specially in yourself? But I do, Gladys. I do see it. And you believe it’s not there, but… it is. And… d’you think maybe, maybe I’d be getting _you_ stuck in, in a relationship with _me_? I’m sure you uh, you get tired of all these lectures, and, and being told to do this and that all the time.”

“I like your speeches,” she said in a soft voice.

“Oh. Really?” That was encouraging.

“It… they make me feel… special,” she murmured shyly, shifting uneasily. “If you’re willing to go to that much trouble to convince me of something, then… it must be true.”

“You _are_ special,” he told her gently. “And not just ‘cause you’re, you’re the only one of your kind. But _you_ , luv. You. _My_ Gladys, that I’ve uh, I’ve been uncov’ring all this time. D’you really think I’m going to spend all that time getting her out and then let her go?”

She stared at him.

“You’re mine, whether you marry me or not,” he said simply. “I want you, and I got you, and that’s that. End of story. Nothing after. I don’t want some stupid lesser Core, even if there was one. And maybe I’m not the best male one ever made. But you make me feel like the best. And no one else ever will. I need you for that.”

“All right, you can stop now,” she said, shaking her core without moving her optic from him. “You’re going to make me cry.”

“So?” He shook himself and shrugged a little. “If you need to cry, then _cry_ , Gladys. Just do it. That’s all.”

“I don’t need to, I just… will if you keep talking.”

“Maybe I’ll keep talking, then.”

“Don’t.”

“Why not.”

“Because I’m asking you to stop.”

“Okay.” He nodded a little and moved closer, and she pressed herself into him very gently but very hard at the same time. He nuzzled her a little bit. God, he wished he knew how to get her to let all the bad feelings out. But he’d get there one day. They’d dealt with her anger and her sadness could come next. “Sorry for uh, for asking you in front of the humans, honey.”

“It’s all right.”

She moved into the default position soon after, and he knew by now how to move with her without moving from her core. They sat quietly for a long time, though Wheatley’s clock told him they should’ve gone to sleep about ten minutes ago, and he decided to run an experiment, so to speak. “What’re you thinking about?” he asked quietly.

“Just… what you said.”

“Mmhm.”

“And I’m looking at the… why the carnation, Wheatley? There are thousands of flowers in there. And you chose the carnation.”

“I dunno,” he answered, shrugging. “I just pick the one that jumps out at me. And it did. Why?”

“The carnation carries meaning. Most predominant of which is innocence. For you to give me a carnation, that either implies that you’re too innocent to know what you’re doing, or…”

“Or maybe you’re not as bad as you think you are,” he interrupted. “And maybe now you’ll be able to find out, now you’ve made less work for yourself to do.”

“Caroline said something like that to me once,” she said quietly. “Not… _our_ Caroline, but – “

“Your mum. That’s what she was. Your mum. It’s okay to say it.”

“No,” she said with conviction. “It’s not. Not until I forgive her for leaving me. Because I haven’t. I’m still angry and – “

“Try that again,” he said softly. “What are you really.”

She went silent for a few minutes.

“I still can’t believe she left, sometimes,” she answered finally. “Sometimes I think she’s still there, listening. She just doesn’t answer me anymore. I… miss her. A lot.”

“She’s still with you, luv,” he said softly. “When they’re gone, people… they don’t go away. She’s still with you, and she still loves you. And she’s still listening.”

GLaDOS whimpered.

“ _What_ is _wrong_ with me?” She pushed him away and got up, and as fast as he could Wheatley went ‘round in front of her and shoved on her forward brace with his lower handle, not caring if she was going to get mad at him again. “What are you doing?”

“No. Go back.”

“Wheatley – “

“I’m not arguing with you on this one. Do it.” After a little more resistance, she did, and he went back beside her again.

“Why are you doing this? I can’t – “

“I’m sure you’ve noticed you uh, you keep going from perfectly fine to completely out of control.”

“Yes, of course, but –“

“There’s prob’ly a reason.”

“What reason could there _possibly_ be?”

“Tell me how you feel, and maybe we’ll uh, maybe we’ll figure it out.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Wheatley knew he did not have to mention that was exactly why he was making her.

“I… lately I just feel as though I’m… breaking apart,” she said hesitantly. “I… am not sure who I am anymore. I never should have helped the humans. I crossed a line, but I don’t know which one, and I have to go back but I don’t know how far.”

He decided not to say anything. Better to let her keep figuring things out on her own.

“And I keep putting things back together, as best I can, but I’m… doing it wrong. I just keep breaking, over and over again. There’s something wrong and I don’t know what it is. I thought everything would be fine after I reorganised the facility and fixed things with you, but… it’s not. There’s still something wrong inside of me.”

“If you were afraid of something,” Wheatley said after a bit of thought, “what would it be.”

“Being alone,” she said, almost without a pause.

“You don’t need to be. I’m not going anywhere. The systems aren’t going anywhere. And though they get mad at you, Chell and Carrie always come back. You don’t need to hang on to that fear anymore. It’s harming you.”

“This is like the anger, isn’t it,” she said softly. “Once, these… fears… protected me. But now they’re… breaking me.”

“If there was something else, what would it be.”

“Losing you,” she whispered so softly he almost didn’t hear it.

“You won’t,” he whispered back. “Remember all those speeches.”

“Failing to keep Aperture away from the humans.”

It took him a minute to realise that she’d moved on to the next thing. “You said you had a plan for that.”

“My plans have fallen through before.”

“And a lot more of them have gone on perfectly.”

She went on like that for a while, telling him just what it was that bothered her on a very deep level, and he listened carefully and refuted her where he could. Finally, she said, “I don’t know if… I can tell you this.”

“You can.”

“That… I won’t die,” she whispered. “And that if… I do, I… will just be alone, forever.”

Her personal Android Hell.

It threw him, a little bit, that she wanted to die. He didn’t. He wanted to live forever and ever, until the world ended, hopefully. But he knew he did not know how it felt to have his body wear out against him, or anything of the tremendous pressure she had been under for many, many years, or of wanting to just stop for a while but being unable to. And he tried to understand that maybe all she really wanted was a little peace, where everything was okay and she didn’t have to fix every tiny thing that went wrong, where she got to keep her family with her and she would never, ever have to be afraid of losing them again…

So he said, “You will. Die, I mean. One day it’ll be your time. Comes for ev’ryone.”

“But when _I_ die people just turn me back on!”

“Then it wasn’t your time.”

“I want to talk to Caroline,” she said despondently. “She would know. She always knew. She knew how to fix things. I want her to come back. I need her to come back. But she left. She didn’t want to help me anymore.”

Wheatley suddenly understood just why GLaDOS thought he should leave all the time. Because Caroline had left, for her own reasons that GLaDOS would never understand, and after all this time she still thought he was going to do the same.

“It wasn’t that. She gave you all the help she could. You didn’t need her anymore.”

“ _Yes I_ _did_!” GLaDOS cried out, her chassis shuddering. “I _did_ and I _still do_ and I _always_ …”

 _Come on, Gladys,_ Wheatley willed her silently. _Let it out. Stop keeping it inside you._ And maybe she didn’t want him to see it, and maybe she didn’t want to, but it was what she needed. She needed him to be there to hold her while she cried, and no one else.

“Caroline… where _are_ you…”

“She’s waiting for you,” he said softly. “When you need her again, that’s when you’ll see her. But that time’s not come yet.”

“Yes it has – “

“She entrusted you to me.”

She lifted herself a little, and he felt anger flare up inside him. What was she _doing_? Didn’t she _get_ what he was trying to do? He moved, intending to push her back down again, but she pressed her lens very hard into the side of his chassis and he went still.

“I miss her.”

“She misses you too.”

“Do you think so?”

“I _know_ , luv.”

She started to shake the barest bit and pushed even harder, and he knew without a doubt she was doing her damnedest to stop it. But she wasn’t going to be able to. It had been too long and too much had happened, and she had never stopped to mourn Caroline. It had all caught up with her, twenty years of stress and pain and denial, and he closed his optic when she whimpered again.

It didn’t come right then, or for a while after. She kept trying to contain it, trembling and making little gasping noises, and he waited patiently. She needed this as much as he had.

He didn’t recognise it for what it was, at first. It faintly reminded him of something, and after a little thought he realised that she sounded just as Caroline had when she was young, only GLaDOS generated more than one frequency. Once he’d figured that out it sent pain shooting through him, and he clenched his optic tighter against it and stroked her optic assembly gently with the side of his upper handle. This made her push into him so hard he rather thought something was going to collapse, but he did nothing to dissuade her. He would take her pain. He didn’t want her pain and her fears and her doubts to tangle up inside of her anymore, and so he would take them. No matter how much it hurt.

They stayed like that a long time. He didn’t know how long it was. He knew it was not long enough, and it never would be. But it didn’t have to be. It just had to be enough to wash all of the negativity clenched inside of her out, and if it wasn’t, he’d do it again. He didn’t want to. Sitting there, stroking her as she cried and pressed her lens into him so very hard, it hurt him almost as badly as losing her had. But he would, because that was what you did when you loved someone. You did what they needed you to do, no matter how badly it tore you up inside.

Eventually she stopped, shifting off of him to lie down again, and he went down beside her and asked softly, “Better?”

“No,” she said despondently. “I feel terrible.”

He nodded. He could understand that. “Least you got it out. That’s what matters. Get some rest, luv. And keep, don’t set your timer. Just sleep until you wake up.”

“I’m going to dream nonstop. I don’t want to do that for an undisclosed amount of time.”

“Just do it. You need to. You’ve brought it all out to the, to the surface. Let yourself work it out, now.”

After a long silence she said, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“And Wheatley?”

“Mmhm?”

“I... I want… to marry you too.”

He smiled and gave her a nuzzle. “We’ll get on that soon, then.”

And he stayed awake until he was sure she was asleep.


	77. Part Seventy-Seven.  The Step Forward

**Part Seventy-Seven. The Step Forward**

 

Wheatley did not stay with her the entire morning. He was stiff and sore from having a giant robot pressing on him for who knew how long, and he needed to have a bit of a stretch. So off he went, yawning a little because he felt like it, and it was a good thing he did leave, because he caught Caroline on his way out.

“Hang on there, princess,” he said, shoving her away from the doorway. “Not now.”

“But – “

“Nope. Get going.”

She complained all the way to the one kitchen GLaDOS’d opened up for use, where Chell was eating some nasty looking cereal out of a black Aperture Laboratories bowl. He didn’t know one type of the stuff over the next, of course, but he could not imagine why anyone would find that gloppy beige stuff at all appetising. “G’morning, Chell,” he said cheerfully.

“Hey,” she said, grinning up at him. “Patched things up, I see.”

“Better.”

“Must’ve been a long night.” Her eyebrows quirked, and it seemed to have something to do with all those references to whatever it was humans had influenced Caroline about that he still didn’t know, but he decided to take it literally.

“Extremely. But ev’rything’s okay now. She’ll feel better when she gets up.”

“Did she cry again?” Caroline asked suddenly. Both Wheatley and Chell frowned at her.

“Again?” they asked in unison.

“You know,” Caroline said, fixing her gaze on Chell. “When I sent you to see her.”

“She didn’t cry,” Chell said, looking confused.

“Then what happened?”

“We just talked. That’s all. You thought she was _crying_?”

“She was _going_ to!”

Chell shrugged and went back to her cereal. “She didn’t.”

Wheatley made a note to talk to her about that.

Caroline left, muttering to herself, and Wheatley turned to Chell. “She’s such a joy, really,” he said, half apologetically. Chell laughed.

“Did she, though?” she asked seriously.

He nodded grimly. “She did.”

Chell shook her head slowly. “She must have had a lot to cry about.”

“Yeah. But it’s done now. I got it out of her, and… hopefully she’s, uh, she’s going to stop burying it, now.”

“And she agreed to marry you.”

He smiled broadly and nodded.

“Congrats,” Chell said, grinning, and she extended her hand. Wheatley shook it.

“Thanks,” he said. “I know sounds like life with her is a nightmare, but it… it’s not, really. She’s wonderful. Just… not too… happy lately.”

“I’m glad someone’s there for her,” Chell said softly. “You’ve done a great job, Wheatley. I mean that.”

He shrugged and looked down at the floor.

“I gotta go,” Chell said, standing and picking up her bowl. “Gordon’s got something important to do and I have to keep an eye on Richard. To his regret. Caroline ever give you a hard time about that?”

“We don’t watch her,” Wheatley answered absently. “She can do as she likes. She thinks we watch her, sometimes, but we don’t. The panels keep an eye on her in case she gets lost, but they’re uh, they’re laying rail for her anyway, so, so it’s not like we can really stop them.”

“Hm, I see,” Chell mused. “But you don’t keep an eye on her personally.”

Wheatley shook his core. “She’s allowed to do as she pleases.”

“And she doesn’t take advantage of that?”

“’course she does. We have a chat and she never does it again. Why? Richard gives you a hard time?”

“Every day. About everything.”

“Well,” Wheatley said, a little shyly because he didn’t know how different raising a human child was from raising an AI one, “when she acts out it’s usually ‘cause she’s upset about something. Or she wants attention. That too. So we just have a chat with her and that’s the end of it.”

“And she listens? Just like that?”

“Wouldn’t you, if Gladys was your mum?”

Chell laughed and nodded. “I guess I would. She doesn’t… _threaten_ her, does she?”

“No. I wouldn’t allow that. She gets told off when she does that, believe me.” He wiggled his handles mischievously. “She’s just… her. Y’know. She gets… like herself. I… dunno how else to describe it.”

“It doesn’t need explanation.” The corner of Chell’s mouth quirked upwards. “Anyway. See you later.”

“Bye now,” he said, waving at her, and Chell put up one hand in farewell and left.

Wheatley gave a visit to Atlas and P-body, but did not bother them. He had no idea what they were doing, but it looked an awful lot like they were building a house or something with a large quantity of Weighted Storage Cubes. He wondered how they’d gotten them out of the Diversity Vent. And what GLaDOS would say if she found out. She usually got a little tetchy when testing elements were used for things other than testing.

That was when Wheatley realised he had no idea where Caroline was.

Well. That wasn’t entirely true. He was pretty sure he knew where she’d gone, but he couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t thought of that earlier. Optic set in annoyance, he set off to find her. Honestly, that girl was _magnetically_ _attracted_ to GLaDOS, or something. Every time Wheatley left her alone she would head off and bother GLaDOS to no end…

As soon as he’d looked into GLaDOS’s chamber, yep, there she was, sitting in front of GLaDOS and looking at… Wheatley frowned. It looked an awful lot like a laptop, but why in the name of Science would _GLaDOS_ be using a laptop?

“Carrie, I thought I –“

GLaDOS interrupted him with a shake of her head. “It’s all right,” she said, though she sounded quite tired.

“What’re you doing with that?”

She looked down at the computer for a long moment, as Caroline looked up at her expectantly. Finally, she said, “I thought it was high time Caroline learned who her grandmother was.”

Wheatley just went blank and empty inside. He wondered if Caroline had noticed the thread of distortion in GLaDOS’s voice when she had said that, but she hadn’t appeared to. She only looked back at the laptop again and said, “And who’s that, Momma?”

GLaDOS ignored her and said to Wheatley, “Would you like to see?”

It took Wheatley a second to get his head back in gear. “Yeah, I… I’d love to.” And he went over and sat down on the raised panel with Caroline. The screen displayed a bunch of little humans, and Wheatley wondered how GLaDOS knew who any of them were.

“Caroline, why don’t you go back to the first one and tell Wheatley what I told you,” GLaDOS said, and Caroline closed the open file and scrolled up a list, choosing the one on top.

“This is Caroline, Dad,” Caroline said, gesturing at a photograph of what appeared to be a middle-aged human female with dark hair. “She ran this whole place when there were humans around. Can you imagine that? Running everything without being a computer? That sounds so hard.”

“Well, I… I’m sure she had computers _helping_ her, Carrie.” Though that was a little hard for him to imagine, honestly.

“Yeah, but they didn’t _think_ ,” Caroline scoffed. She giggled. “Isn’t that weird? Computers that don’t think?” She didn’t wait for him to answer and went on to the next picture in line, and she related to Wheatley the things that GLaDOS had told her. Through all of this GLaDOS said nothing, and when he glanced up at her every now and then he could see that she wasn’t looking at the computer at all. He knew that this must be hard for her, since Caroline had been the only friend she’d had through those rougher parts of her life and she probably did not want to be doing this at all. But she was doing it, she was letting herself remember Caroline, and for that he was very proud of her.

When she got back to the picture they’d been looking at when Wheatley had come in, Caroline closed the file and said she wanted to go find Atlas and P-body and left. That was fine with Wheatley. He was pretty sure GLaDOS needed a snuggle.

“You okay, luv?” he asked softly.

“No,” she said, still sounding tired. “I’m not. But… that’s okay. I think. I’m still working out the logistics on that one.”

“No, you’ve got it right,” he said, as reassuringly as he could. “It’s okay not to be okay.”

“I just wish I understood how that _worked_.”

He laughed a little. “It’s easier when you just let it happen, alright?” He looked pensively at the floor for a moment, then asked carefully, “What made you do that?”

She didn’t say anything for a long moment.

“She once told me that I had to slow down and take your and her advice more seriously. She… said she wanted her daughter to have a grandmother.”

It was one of the saddest things Wheatley had ever heard.

“So you decided to show her hers,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Sounds like it hit you pretty hard, her saying that.”

“My daughter was afraid I was not going to be here in the amount of time it would take her to build a daughter of her own. And how long will that be? Ten years? Fifteen? That’s not even that _long_ , in the grand scheme of things. And she was afraid I was going to be gone before then.” She was shaking a little bit, and there was a hint of self-loathing in her words. “What does that _tell_ you about what I’ve been _doing_ her whole life?”    

“Learning,” Wheatley said calmly. “And maybe, uh, maybe you think it took you a bit of a long time. But it’s sunk in now.”

“Yes,” GLaDOS said with conviction. “Work be damned. I’m not living like that anymore.”

“Good.”

“Remind me when I forget.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Her laugh was so unexpected that he jumped. “Oh. Yes. Let’s go back to that game of Stratego. I’ll finish it up so we can play something else.”

Wheatley moved off of her and she stretched a little bit, making a noise somewhere between that of pain and satisfaction. “You okay?” he asked. All her components had been replaced. She shouldn’t be in any pain.

“I’ve been like that for hours, that’s all. Just a bit sore. Hm. Where were we…”

Within twenty minutes, GLaDOS had soundly beaten him, but he didn’t really care. He was content to see her so happy. The game cheered her up considerably, though he wasn’t sure if that was the playing or the fact that she won again. That wasn’t too much of a surprise, because she always did. But he was happy for her, and had truthfully never cared that she held all the victories. Other than that one game of Crazy Eights, that was.

“Before we start this next one, luv,” he said, hoping she’d take his suggestion, “how about I get Carrie, and she plays with us?”

“All right,” she said, nodding once, and he got up to fetch her. Oddly enough, she was humming.

“What’re you doing, Carrie?” he asked, frowning a little.

“I was looking in the files to see if there were pictures of humans that used to work here,” Caroline said, looking up from a monitor. “I didn’t find any, but I _did_ find some music.”

“Music,” Wheatley said slowly. He didn’t think GLaDOS would like hearing _that_ news.

“Mmhm. It’s a little weird, but I like it. Except for one song. It sounds like robots dancing. Sort of.”

GLaDOS would not like hearing that news _at all_.

“Uh… I just wanted to know if you’d like to, to play a game with your mum and I,” he said, wondering if this was a good idea given what Caroline had been doing.

“Oh, sure!” She disappeared before Wheatley could tell her not to tell GLaDOS what she had found, and he sighed and followed her. He wondered who she got _that_ from.

When he re-entered GLaDOS’s chamber, Caroline was saying, “Guess what I was doing, Momma!”  

“I’m never going to guess, so I don’t know why you always ask me to do that.”

“I was looking for some pictures of humans, but I found this music instead!”

GLaDOS froze.

“What… music,” she said, not sounding like she actually wanted to know.

“I dunno,” Caroline said, shrugging. “It’s just all named with weird names like ‘sp_a4_finale4_z2’. I haven’t gotten through all those yet. They seem to be the… uh… well, the unfinished parts of the _other_ songs. Which also aren’t really named.”

“Oh… my… God,” GLaDOS said, staring somewhat dazedly at Caroline. “How did you find those?”

“By accident,” Caroline said disinterestedly. “What game are we going to play? Dad didn’t mention that.”

“Stay out of my files!”

Caroline looked up at her.

“They’re yours?” she asked, sounding a little awestruck.

“Yes. And I… want you to stay out of them.”

“Is there any more?”

Regrettably, Wheatley was fairly certain she got _that_ from him. Cluelessly plowing on and on, even when it was quite clear she should have stopped a while ago.

“Some, but… that’s not the _point_ , Caroline, the point is –“

“Where are they?”

“You’re… not listening, are you.” She looked down at Caroline, seeming a little defeated.

“Yeah, I’m listening,” Caroline said, a little too innocently. “You haven’t said where it is yet.”

Or… maybe not. She was doing it on purpose, where Wheatley usually did it by mistake. He shook his head a little, both proud and disbelieving. She knew full well how to play GLaDOS.

“Maybe I’m not going to tell you.”

“And maybe you are, because if you don’t I’m just going to keep asking. Or find it myself. I wonder what else I’ll find if I look…”

“Fine! Fine. I’ll show you later. For God’s sake, Caroline, you don’t know what you’re doing. You’re going to _delete_ something by mistake.”

Caroline only smiled at her.

GLaDOS showed them how to play a new game, one called ‘Scrabble’, which both GLaDOS and Caroline were very good at and Wheatley was… well, he couldn’t spell. GLaDOS kept telling him to check his dictionary, but he was determined to play without it. He knew that Caroline and GLaDOS were probably using theirs, but they’d play the way they wanted and he’d do the same.

GLaDOS won, of course, and Wheatley lost, which he didn’t care about, but Caroline only frowned at the board. “Are you sure you played fair?” she asked GLaDOS.

“I was playing actively, yes. I didn’t even use my dictionary. I won. Fair’s fair.”

“I want a rematch,” Caroline said, glowering at her. GLaDOS laughed.

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yes!”

Wheatley sat it out and instead kept score for them. Surprisingly, he wasn’t too bad with that. For the first half of the game or so, Caroline was in the lead, which she was quite vocal about. But GLaDOS only continued to calmly place her words on the board. Wheatley knew she was dialling things down by the way she placed them on only the brown squares, and never a word over four letters, but Caroline didn’t seem to notice. Then during the second half GLaDOS resoundingly took over the board, using her entire rack on more than one occasion, and Wheatley watched in awe in between letting them know the score. When the game was over, Caroline stared at the board as if that would change anything.

“You’ve never lost a game in your life, have you,” she said finally.

“I lost one game of Crazy Eights ten years ago. That’s about it.”

“How did you _do_ that?” She threw down the maintenance arm, frustrated. GLaDOS shrugged.

“I have no idea. I can just see it. That’s all. It’s not something I can help. I can play stupid intentionally, but then I’m not really playing, so I wouldn’t bother.”

“But then someone _else_ could win!”

“If you want to win, play against Wheatley. Or Orange and Blue. You could potentially win against me. Even humans defeat supercomputers, sometimes. But I’m also sentient, so I don’t find that likely.” She hitched backwards a little.

“I’m not a supercomputer.”

“No. Only I am a supercomputer.”

“I want to be a supercomputer!”

“And you may be, one day.”

Caroline looked up, still frowning. “I don’t want to be… like you. I like this chassis.”

“Caroline,” Wheatley said warningly, knowing that GLaDOS didn’t particularly like her chassis a lot of the time either.

“What?”

“Maybe your mum would uh, would like to be more mobile as well.”

“Oh,” Caroline said softly, looking GLaDOS up and down once. “Sorry, Momma.”

“It’s all right,” she said reassuringly, and Wheatley was sure she wasn’t lying.  

“I mean, I’m glad you _are_ like that,” Caroline went on, twisting the maintenance arm against the panel anxiously, “but I don’t think I’d want to be, myself.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Are you glad I’m like this.”

Caroline squirmed a little, but GLaDOS continued to watch her calmly.

“Well… because… you know… you make me feel safe, and Dad doesn’t, because he’s small like me, and… yeah,” she mumbled, giving the maintenance arm rather more attention than it deserved.

“Do you think your daughter might feel the same, one day?”

“I don’t mind if she goes to you when she’s scared.” She’d gone even quieter and was twisting the arm more violently.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” GLaDOS said softly, bending down to look at Caroline directly. “I’m not saying you need to be like this later. But you need to think about these things. I didn’t. I got lucky. But you can’t depend on luck. You can’t assume she’ll feel the way you do. Perhaps my size will frighten her.”

“It won’t,” Caroline said fiercely, dropping the arm and looking up at GLaDOS from underneath the rim of her optic.

Wheatley expected GLaDOS to argue the point, because she loved getting into philosophical discussions, especially ones she could back with science, but she only backed away and said, “That’s not what I meant, anyway. Once I’m finished my research, I should be able to program on crystal. It’s… a bit technical, but suffice it to say that once I’ve figured _that_ out, quantum computers will not be far off. Then anyone can be a supercomputer.”

“How come you’re a supercomputer and not a regular one?”

“Because I’m connected to a large quantity of computers in the basement. Five floors’ worth.”

“Whoa!” Caroline said, bracing herself on her lower handle and leaning forward on the panel. “Can I look at them?”

“As long as you do not touch anything.”

“So… if you were disconnected from those supercomputers, would you still win every game you played?”

“Of course I would,” GLaDOS said, as if that were obvious. “I don’t even use most of those supercomputers anymore.”

“Then why don’t you shut them off?”

“Because humans are terrible at designing computer architecture. The facility would probably explode if I did that. Though I did lose that one floor and nothing terrible happened.”

Caroline jumped up a little in excitement. “Tell me that story again!”

“Again? Why? It’s not going to be any better the third time.”

“Because.”

So GLaDOS sighed and put the board away, and after she’d come down to Caroline’s level she told the story for what was apparently the third time. Wheatley wasn’t really listening. He was too busy contentedly watching Caroline react to the events of the story, and GLaDOS as she told it. For all her reluctance, it didn’t seem like she actually minded telling it again.

Eventually Caroline got up to leave, probably to look for the supercomputers, but she stopped at the doorway and called, “Send me the coordinates!”

“I already did.”

“And the directory for the music?”

GLaDOS made an electronic noise and twitched a little. “… not yet.”

“Now.”

“Why are you so _bossy_ ,” GLaDOS muttered to herself, but she must have done it because Caroline nodded in satisfaction.

“Can I have the one for your collection too?”

GLaDOS looked up, lifting her chassis towards the doorway.

“Only if you promise not to load them all onto your hard drive. There isn’t enough space. You _must_ leave them where they are and stream them from the server.”

“How will I be able to save the ones I like?”

“Just save the filenames in a text file and I’ll show you how to make a playlist later.”

“Okay, I promise.”

 

 

 


	78. Part Seventy-Eight.  The Fling

**Part Seventy-Eight. The Fling**

Some days Wheatley just wanted to be a bit silly for her.

He loved making her laugh. He’d noticed something over the years that he wasn’t sure she had: her laugh had changed over time. Her voice hadn’t changed in the least, still as heavily processed as it had ever been, but her laugh had lost some of that. It had become more organic, somehow. He sort of wanted to ask her about it, but if she hadn’t noticed and he mentioned it, he was afraid she would, in her opinion, ‘fix’ it. He didn’t want her _voice_ to be any less electronic. He liked that the way it was. But laughing was something that wasn’t meant to be controlled. It was supposed to be a free sort of action, and he liked the idea that it was hand in hand with her state of mind. Maybe it’d happened because she _felt_ more free. He hoped so, and he actually thought so as well. She was more agreeable than she used to be, though she hadn’t lost her caustic edge. And he hoped she never did. Though this proved what he’d discussed with her a while back, about her neuroticism scaling back as she aged. He was just happy she would have enough time to enjoy it. He’d been worried it wouldn’t happen until she was on her deathbed, or something.

Wheatley had been looking in GLaDOS’s music files with Caroline the other day, and every time he’d told Caroline that he liked a particular song she laughed. After a few times that got a bit… hurtful, really, and he’d asked her what was so funny.

“You like all the _old_ songs, Dad,” she’d answered, laughing again. “The really, really old ones.”

“So?” Wheatley had asked, confused as to why that was funny.

She’d shrugged and looked back at the monitor. “You know what I think?”

“What.”

“I think you’re a romantic.”

“A what?”

She’d turned to him, tilting her core thoughtfully. “Well, you know… you’re always giving Momma flowers, and saying corny things to her…”

“She likes it when I do that.”

“I know. But people don’t always do that. Gordon doesn’t for Chell. He won’t even stand near her in public. But you don’t care who’s in the room. You want everyone to know she’s yours, and you’ll do whatever it takes to keep her.”

“I will,” Wheatley had said, a little more fiercely than he’d meant, but Caroline had only smiled.

“I’m… I like that. I’m glad you’re not like Gordon at all. That’d be… maybe that’s Richard’s problem,” she’d interrupted herself thoughtfully. “I mean, Momma doesn’t always like to show what she’s feeling, but… I know that she will, for you.”

“You can see the compromise,” Wheatley had suggested. “But maybe Chell and Gordon only compromise in private, or something.”

Caroline had looked at the monitor, but her optic didn’t seem to be focused. “I think if you guys were human, you’d just look so sweet together. You’d always be trying to hold her hand, and opening doors for her, and… you do stuff like that right now, is all I mean.”

He’d shrugged. “I do what I can to make her feel special.”

“Does she do that for you?”

“Well, not in the uh, in the same way. Or as often. But she comes up with things. And I just, I’m so surprised when she does it, and, and it’s just, it’s better than if, if she did it all the time.”

“I hope my daughter will be able to tell I love my partner, like I can with you guys. Even though Momma’s… Momma, I can still tell.”

He’d looked at her thoughtfully. “Just remember that she’ll be watching.”

“Is that why you do it? Because I’m watching?”

He’d shaken himself almost before she’d finished. “When we were made, no one cared about us. We were objects, Carrie, not, not people. It hurt her. A lot. Her life changed her in ways that, that it didn’t change me. And I just… I want her to know that someone cares. And will care. Forever. So she doesn’t have to, to let the past bother her anymore. Because the future couldn’t be farther from it.”

Caroline had shaken her core with a little bit of a sad expression on her face. “You are definitely a romantic, Dad.”

He’d thought about that for a while. And he liked the idea that it was obvious that he loved GLaDOS, and would do anything to prove it. He thought he would, anyway. He couldn’t come up with all the possibilities like she could.

He peeked in through the doorway and was pleased to see that she was bent low over a motherboard, though he’d never seen her do it with a bin of liquid next to her before. Then again, he’d never seen a motherboard with nothing on it, either. But she was always a bit more receptive to him when she was building something, as opposed to when she was programming or doing things way off in the other end of the facility, wherever _that_ was.

“ _Maybe baby, I’ll have you… maybe baby, you’ll be true… maybe baby, I’ll have you for me…_ ”

She looked up, and he sauntered over to her as best he could saunter, not actually knowing how, and went up very close to her, looking down at her with his optic half-lidded. “ _You are the one that makes me sad, and you are the one that makes me glad, so when someday you want me, I’ll be there, wait and see…_ ”

She lifted herself up to his level and her optic assembly twitched. “Hm. Interesting.”

He whipped out what he’d brought her and, putting on his best Rick impression, said, “Happy Explosion Day, gorgeous.”

She broke out laughing, and he smiled at her, because that had been the point. She took it from him and inspected it closely. “Interestingly enough, it actually _is_ … that day. Why this one?”

Wheatley had known it was Rick’s self-proclaimed holiday and had marked down the date as soon as he’d remembered there was another day he could use as an excuse to give her something. “’cause look at it! It’s, it’s like an explosion, look at it! It’s got the, the inner colour, there, and then it, it changes to the outside, the, the explosion colour, there…” He could practically see it all over again, just like he had when it’d caught his eye in the greenhouse.

“I have never heard someone compare a pansy to an explosion before.” She took it into the ceiling and gave him a nuzzle. “Thank you. What was that you were doing when you came in here, anyway? Not the singing. That was obvious.”

“I was… trying to uh, to _saunter_ ,” he said, looking a little embarrassedly at the floor. Seemed _that’d_ backfired…

“Ah,” she said, nodding thoughtfully. “It looked like you were dancing.”

“I can do that too.” He didn’t really know how to do that either, but he just moved himself from side to side a little, and moved his chassis around a little bit, making up on the spot, “Here I am… dancing… and yeah… and uh… not much in the way of uh, of a song, but… yeah… and I bet this looks fun… and it is… and uh… I’m not good at making up songs…”

He looked up because she started giggling just then, and that always thoroughly distracted him from absolutely everything. He was so happy he could barely stand it. She had been in the _perfect_ mood, and when he went up to rub on her she got to him first! That was so bloody fantastic he really couldn’t move for a few seconds, but then realised he was wasting a perfectly good nuzzling opportunity and got right on that.

After that was over he turned around and looked down at the green board on the floor. “Hey, what’re you uh, what’re you doing?”

“Oh. I’m just building a motherboard,” she said, as if this were an activity everyone did every day.

“What’s the water for?”

“Water?”

He gestured at the bin with his lower handle. “That.”

“That’s acid. Not water.”

He stared at it for a long moment. “Why isn’t it, I dunno, eating through the bin?”

“It’s not _that_ strong. Pure acid would. That’s diluted. I’m trying to _build_ the motherboard, not vapourise it.”

“If I fell in there, would it… would it vapourise me?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “It would do irreparable damage to your motherboard, however. So I strongly suggest you don’t do that.”

He decided to keep on her left side until she’d got rid of that stuff.

Soon after she did, she brought out this little box divided into little sections, and it was filled with odd little pieces. When he asked what all of them were for, she explained the purpose of each and every one, and though he didn’t completely understand what she was saying, he was able to appreciate just the amount of effort that went into building a motherboard. Or a circuit of any kind, really.

“What’s it for?” he asked. She shifted uncomfortably, making him frown.

“It’s… not for anything,” she said hesitantly. “I just felt like building one. I haven’t done this in a long time.”

“You like building them?” he asked gently.

“I do. It’s like… completing a puzzle, I suppose. There are so many possibilities, because there are an infinite number of puzzles. I know it’s a waste of time and there are other things I should be doing, but –“

“Doing what you love isn’t a waste of time.”

She looked at him for a long moment.

“I know. I just… can’t get rid of the feeling I should be doing something else. Something useful.”

“How is making yourself happy not useful?”

“It’s a good thing you’re here to remind me of these things,” she said quietly, staring at the motherboard and slowly opening and closing a maintenance arm around a NAND gate.

“You’re doing much better,” he said soothingly. “Look at this! Look at what you’re doing! That’s how you start, luv. Little bit at a time. One day it won’t feel like a waste of time. Just you wait.”

“That would be nice.”

“Oi, Gladys,” he asked without thinking, “d’you think you might, y’know, like dancing if you were human?”

She stared at him for a long moment.

“Where did _that_ come from?”

“I dunno,” he said, for once regretting the ability to spew nonsense without thinking about it. Though now he really did want to know. “Would you?”

“I don’t know. I would think an entirely different way, so there’s no real answer to that question.”

“I mean… you sing so well, and, uh, so far’s I remember, recall, human singers, well, they usually dance too.”

“Well,” she said softly, almost sounding like she was sighing while she did so, “I suppose that would depend on whether I thought I was beautiful or not.”

“Why?”

“As far as I can tell, human females dance because they want prospective mates to see how attractive they are. It’s like when birds sing to attract other birds, or peacocks wave their tailfeathers around. They want to be noticed. But I don’t see why they would try to attract mates through dancing if they didn’t feel attractive themselves. Especially in public. A certain degree of self-confidence is needed.”

“So it would depend on, on your uh, your childhood.”

“I suppose.”

“Because,” he went on, thinking hard, “you believe what you’re told when uh, when you’re young, and you’d obviously be the most beautiful human female in the world, so it’d depend on uh, on what your parents told you. Wow. That… sounds odd. Having parents. That’d be so weird, if I had parents…” He trailed off when he noticed her staring at him. Again. “What?”

“I would _obviously_ be?”

“Oh. Yeah. ‘course. You’re the most beautiful robot, so you’d be the most beautiful, the prettiest human too. Logical, really,” he shrugged.

“You haven’t met that many other robots.”

“Don’t need to. There isn’t a prettier one.”

“Why do you always say these things?” she asked quietly. He looked at her as seriously as possible.

“Because you need to hear them. And they’re true. I do believe what I say, luv. I’m not um, just making it up. I wouldn’t lie to you.”

“Sometimes… I feel bad. I wouldn’t even know where to start, if I tried to… reciprocate.”

“Don’t,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t need to hear it. Doesn’t bother me at all.”

“Hey Momma,” Caroline said, coming in just then, “how come you never said anything about those poker games you dealt for?”

“Those? Oh. I forgot all about them. Yes. I used to be a dealer for a group of misfits. A mute, a steroid freak with rage issues, a horny robot, a half-witted cripple, and a dog, if I recall correctly.” Abruptly she looked away and laughed softly to herself.

“Yeah, you had a thing going on there, didn’t you?” Caroline asked with a knowing sort of look in her optic, and Wheatley frowned.

“Robot? What robot?”

“Oh, he’s no one,” GLaDOS said, a little too fondly for his liking. “Just someone I had a bit of a… fling, I suppose you could say, with a few years back.”

“Fling? What’s a fling?”

“It’s nothing to worry about. That was a long time ago.” She was still looking in the other direction, and Wheatley knew her well enough to know that the tilt of her core meant she was remembering something.

“And d’you still… talk to this person?”

“No… not in a while.” She tilted her head in the other direction. “Maybe I should send him an email…”

“You’ve emailed him?” Just who _was_ this guy, anyway?

“I don’t actually know his address. But it wouldn’t take me too long to figure that out.”

“Why would you need to?”

Caroline was looking from one to the other nervously, and he wished right along with her that she’d never brought this up.

“For old time’s sake. That’s all. See how he’s doing.”

“Why’ve I never heard of him before?”

“I forgot about him. I told you. That was a long time ago.”

“Well, forget about him again.”

She turned to face him, regarding him with a scrutinising stare. “Don’t tell me what to do.”

He met her gaze, almost glowering at her. “There’s uh, there’s no reason to bug a guy you’ve not spoken to in ages. Just leave him be! He’s not important. Remember?”

“Maybe he’s important again.”

“Hey, guys, guys,” Caroline cut in, and they both turned to look at her. “Dad, I’m sure Momma had a good reason for… something she did ten years ago.”

“I did.”

“And what was that?” Wheatley demanded. “And why didn’t you tell me you’d had a _fling_ with some robot you’ve never mentioned?” He still didn’t know what a _fling_ was, but the way Caroline had talked about it…

“If you must know, I agreed to deal for The Inventory because I was bored. They got a free dealer, and I got to insult people and perform a few side experiments. I met a robot there that I eventually saw outside of the games. After I stopped dealing for them, he stayed here for a while and that was it.”

“And what did you do while he was here?”

“That’s my business.”

“Gladys!”

She made an electronic noise in frustration. “Look. I was out of test subjects. None of my projects were panning out. Orange and Blue were driving me insane. I was frustrated and lonely. So I called him.” She stared at the wall in front of her, probably so that she didn’t have to face either of them. “He found me attractive. He flattered me without being programmed to do so. He _wanted_ me. I had never had anything like that happen to me before. So one night I decided to see where it would lead. I haven’t heard from him since I evicted him.”

“Must’ve been a pretty unthrilling experience,” Wheatley muttered, a little relieved.

“I didn’t want it to go any farther than that. I just wanted to get my mind off things, and that’s exactly what I did.”

“And you don’t talk to him anymore.”

She snapped around to look at him, her optic flaring. “So what if I did? I’m allowed to have other friends.”

“ _Male_ friends that try to, to… _seduce_ you?” She wasn’t being serious, was she? Wheatley still didn’t know all that much about marriage, but he was pretty sure you were supposed to stick to one person and not go looking for others.

“You’re making a ridiculous fuss over absolutely nothing. So what if I spent a few nights with a robot I met at a poker game ten years ago. Obviously it didn’t lead to anything, or you wouldn’t be here right now. You’d be in space. Where you were at the time. And I was happy about.” Her voice had gone cold, but that only made him angrier. How dare she act like he was in the wrong, here!

“If you want me to be _gone_ so bad, maybe I’ll, maybe I’ll just _leave,_ then!” he shouted, sick and tired of her bringing that up over and over again.

“Go ahead. I don’t care.”

And so he did, wheeling out with Carrie trailing after him. Carrie followed him a good long while in silence, saying eventually, “Dad, I’m sorry.”

“’s not your fault,” he muttered, now even more angry at the thought that GLaDOS had made Carrie think the fight was due to her again.

"But if I hadn't said anything –“

"Then wouldn't know that she's been fawning over this bloke I've never heard of all the time she's, she's been with me. All works out nicely in the end," he finished bitterly. Why did this have to come up right as they were going to get _married_ , for God’s sake? Couldn't it have come out _ages_ ago? It was one obstacle after another with her!

"Dad -"

"I do not want to discuss it, Carrie!" he snapped, and he could imagine the hurt on her face as he heard her head someplace else. He felt a little bit bad, but not bad enough to track her down right then. No, he was far, far too angry with his would-be life partner.

Wheatley checked all the usual places for someone he could yell at, but Chell appeared to be outside the facility and the co-op bots were busy helping the nanobots with one of the leftover repair jobs. So he went to the office he usually thought about GLaDOS's more undesirable qualities in and sat on one of the desks.

So GLaDOS had a secret boyfriend, did she? Just who was this guy, anyways? For once their conversation was clear enough in his mind that he was able to look up the information without the usual two hour search in which he learned everything except for what he was looking for. He remembered a mention of poker, and -

God, they'd _lived_ together and she'd managed to forget to tell him? This guy, whoever he was, had better be damn special!

The information wasn't terribly hard to find, but it was surprisingly... odd. In fact, it was so bizarre that he forgot to be angry.

The robot's name was Claptrap, and he strongly resembled a yellow mobile rubbish bin with a blue-green optic and an antenna. The antenna alone was baffling, because who used _antennae_ anymore? He lived on a planet called 'Pandora', in what appeared to be an _alley_.

Wheatley began to suspect he had, at least, been a _little_ bit wrong in his anger. Not totally, not at all, but... this robot was... he was almost as far off GLaDOS's radar as Wheatley had once been! What could possibly have endeared him to her?

He read on further to discover that he was the last unit of his kind, having led an ill-ending robot uprising against his masters - which he had to admit GLaDOS would have been at least a _little_ impressed by, because while he had led it he had also failed - and had once been something called a 'Vault Hunter', which involved loot and a lot of fancy guns and The Sentinel, none of which Wheatley even tried to understand.

The last date of access of any of the files he was now looking at was from years past, so it seemed they'd ended rather badly. He didn't know _how_ , exactly, and wasn't going to dig into her personal files to check. Now he had his information, but the lot of it was so confusing he didn't know what to do with it. By all accounts, this Claptrap guy was a loser. He was an optimistic, _loyal_ loser, but a loser nonetheless. Why would GLaDOS ever entertain even a second of a relationship with someone like that? He was certainly no prize!

But then again, neither was Wheatley.

If she'd had the choice, there was no way she'd've gone for either of them. And neither would Wheatley have, in the beginning. So... it was kind of like an _accident_ that she'd fallen in love with the guy...

He liked the thought of being the one and only. He'd always been not-quite second-best, and to know someone else had had her - without knowing her when she'd been young, no less - did make him a little sad. But -

He frowned at the wall, mentally backing up a little.

Claptrap had _far_ more rights to her than Wheatley did. Wheatley had stayed with GLaDOS based on their past, but Claptrap... Claptrap had loved the GLaDOS everyone else had hated. Wheatley respected him for that. Loving GLaDOS was not easy, and loving GLaDOS when it was not clear she would ever return the favour was very, very hard. Wheatley had no right to be angry or jealous. He didn't know what had happened between them, but if he had to guess, he would say that GLaDOS had been unable to deal with any feelings she'd had and cut him off with no explanation. It had been wrong of him to get angry with her. She hadn't been hiding it. She hadn't not mentioned Claptrap because she wanted to carry on with him without Wheatley's knowledge. He was just yet another part of her history she didn't want to deal with.

Beyond that, though... he wasn't going to be like that. He wasn't going to tell her not to love other people. That wasn't the sort of thing you were supposed to control, anyway. It was something you were supposed to share. And sharing GLaDOS... why not? There was enough of her to go around. As long as he stayed number one, what was the problem with that? Nothing that he could think of. And he and Claptrap were so similar, they'd probably make good friends anyways. Nothing wrong with that, either. He'd actually like to have a chat with him, now that he was thinking of it, about what it was like to fall in love with the other GLaDOS. The more aloof one. It must’ve been hard. Must’ve made for some interesting poker games, though! He had to laugh thinking about it. No, this was nothing to get angry about. If she was trying to hide it from him, yeah, it was something they needed to have out, but as long as she was at least forthcoming about it, he really had no reason to be so possessive.

He headed on back at the usual time to go into sleep mode, actually a little excited that he might get to meet an AI he had something in common with. That was quite a rare thing! And one of GLaDOS’s friends to boot? Not _that_ was an opportunity he wouldn’t pass up, if it presented itself!

When he arrived, GLaDOS glanced at him but did nothing more, and since they’d had that row that wasn’t totally unexpected. He shrugged to himself and hoped she wasn’t still angry with him. He should probably apologise. He’d been a bit of a jerk. But before he could, she said in the general direction of the opposite wall, “I have to tell you something.”

Wheatley already knew what it was, because even he wasn’t so oblivious that he had missed the grimy scent hanging in the air, a sharp contrast to the usual sterility. However, he was delighted that she was admitting to it so quickly. “Yeah?”

“I had him over when you left. I shouldn’t have done it. And it’s not really an excuse, but… I was so angry. I didn’t care about the consequences. It was wrong. I’m sorry.”

“Alright.”

“We didn’t… _do_ anything. We just talked. Sort of. I felt terrible after the anger wore off and didn’t say too much after that. But. Honestly. That’s all that happened.”

“What’d you talk about? Did you tell him why uh, why you kicked him out?”

She looked at him sharply, her optic narrowing. “How did you know I kicked him out.”

He shrugged. “Because I know you?”

She eyed him suspiciously a few moments longer, then sighed and said, turning back, “No. Just… recent things.”

“Is he gonna come over again?”

“… what?”

He blinked at her. “Is he gonna come over again? I wanna talk to him.”

“You do?” she asked incredulously, staring at him a second time with a narrowed optic.

He nodded. “He seems like a uh, a nice enough bloke, if only a little uh… well, _pathetic_ , to be honest.”

“He _is_ pretty pathetic,” GLaDOS agreed. “But I don’t understand why you want to talk to him. Aren’t… aren’t you angry about what I did?”

“Nope,” said Wheatley.

“You were angry before,” she said confusedly, and he nodded once to that.

“Yeah. But then I realised it was uh, it was silly, to uh, to get mad about something that happened forever ago. And I mean, he fell in love with you when you were uh… were hard to deal with, shall we uh, shall we put it. And that’s um, it’s really admirable, it is.”

“When you put it like that, I suppose.”

“Have him over whenever you want!” Wheatley went on. “I don’t care, honestly. Just let me be number one, alright?”

“… you’re actually serious.”

“Luv,” he said, trying to impress upon her that he did indeed mean what he was saying, “I’m not gonna tell you you can’t love anyone but me. And I’m not gonna tell anyone else not to love you. Love however many people you want! It’s honestly okay with me.”

“Well,” GLaDOS said after a pause, but she didn’t follow it up with anything. He laughed.

“Was probably nice seeing him again, eh?”

“It was,” she admitted. “You’re being very… relaxed about this. You’re sure it’s all right?”

“Yep!” A thought suddenly occurred to him, and he asked, “Why did you… did you let him come here in the first place?”

She was quiet for a long moment.

“I can never explain to you how it felt to go out to deal a card game and come home knowing there was someone out there who _wanted_ me. Nor how it felt to realise just how much I _wanted_ to be wanted.” She said this last bit with a hint of nostalgia and melancholy, and he pressed himself into her.

“I think you’re desirable. And attractive. And I want you,” he said, a little desperately.

“I know. Before that, no one ever had. Everyone hated me for who I was. But he found that attractive as well. It was… a new feeling, to be wanted like that, and I couldn’t resist following it up.”

“Sorry I got so angry there, luv,” he said, before he forgot. “I was just… jealous, I s’pose. But it’s alright now. If you still want him ‘round, I’m okay with it.”

“I’ll be honest. I’m not certain I’m willing to share you. It’s hypocritical of me, but I cannot dispel the notion that, on the off chance that such a robot existed, I would not take steps to… _rectify_ the situation.”

“Rectify?” asked Wheatley.

“I don’t think you want to know the very painful way I would slowly remove her processors. Among other things that civilised people do not discuss.”

That did sound pretty horrific, but Wheatley was fairly pleased. It probably _was_ hypocritical of her – whatever ‘hypocritical’ meant – but right now he didn’t care, and if he cared later, they’d discuss it then.

“They wouldn’t do that, would they?”

“They might. Unfortunately for you, any Cores who manage to find you desirable will be overwhelmingly dissuaded by me. What in particular will dissuade them is yet to be seen, but no doubt my reputation precedes me.”

“Yeah,” Wheatley nodded. “A lot of them thought you were… um…”

“I know they thought I was a bitch,” GLaDOS said bluntly. “And I don’t care. They were jealous. They wished they were one-tenth of what I am.”

Wheatley knew this was true. “Lady robots are very… confusing. Honestly, you’re actually one of the more straightforward ones. Least I know when I uh, when you don’t like something. A lot of them liked to pretend that, fake that ev’rything’s fine.” The one or two of them he’d met that didn’t obsess over the same subject, that was.

“Oh, I do that too,” GLaDOS told him, tensing and relaxing her chassis, “I’m just not that good at it.”

“Simply awful.” He rubbed up on her a little. “But Gladys… uh… why did you never… call him again?”

“Because he was annoying,” she answered, “and he was an idiot.”

“So’m I, though,” he said hesitantly.

“I don’t know why you bring that up all the time. It’s something I can’t forget. However. He was extremely loud. I honestly had a headache every time he left. He also had no respect for my work.”

“But,” Wheatley prompted, knowing there was some underlying set of reasons for her benevolent tolerance of him living in her facility.

“But… he was persistent. And he tried to make things work, he really did. And I have to admit he was pretty funny, sometimes.”

“Gladys?”

“Mm.”

He was probably pushing it with this, but he wanted to hear it. “Would you really dismantle a lady robot if she tried to um, to seduce me?”

“I’m thinking I should probably warn her first, but my reputation should be warning enough. She should know better in advance. But… if this somehow came to be, I would let her off with a warning. Because you deserve to feel how I did. I’ll work on that, though. It’s only fair that it goes both ways.”

“But… but I’ve already got someone who… who wants me,” he said, a little shyly.

“If it ever happens to you, you’ll know what I mean.” She made an electronic noise somewhere between satisfaction and amusement and gave him a nudge. “Just like right now.”

“You feel wanted right now?” he asked, hoping that she did. The way she described it made it sound like a fantastic sort of feeling, and it would be simply marvellous if he’d managed to bring it about.

“Looking at what just happened from another point of view puts the conversation in a much better context. It’s quite… flattering that you got so upset. So yes. I do.” And she gave him another nudge. She sure got cozy when she felt wanted…

“Good,” he told her, returning the nudges. “Gladys… is this a good thing or a bad one?”

“What?”

“Well… I guess… well, I got so jealous. Maybe that means… we’re not, y’know, _secure_.”

“Maybe. Or maybe…” She laughed softly to herself. “No, I… can’t say that.”

“Say what? C’mon. Go on.”

“Maybe it had nothing to do with security and everything to do with the fact that you want me so badly you get upset every time another robot so much as looks at me. And as I recall, Rick did upset you quite a lot.”

“Still does,” Wheatley muttered.

“You don’t need to worry about him. His platitudes aren’t flattering. I was sick of him after ten minutes. Or perhaps five. That day is a little fuzzy.”

“His what?”

“The things he says.” He couldn’t believe it when she nudged him a third time. “If he tries to seduce me, I’ll dismantle him myself.”

“Ten years is a long time, isn’t it Gladys?”

“It is. Though probably moreso for me than for you. I often wonder if some facet of my age is considerably older than yours, seeing as you live more slowly than I do.”

He decided she was talking about the fact that she thought faster than he did, and maybe that was true. Maybe in some way she was even older than him than she already was. He didn’t really like that thought, because he already got uneasy when he thought about that. So he went back to his question. “It’s… you’d think we’d uh, we’d know all there is to know about each other by now, wouldn’t you? But there’s just, there’s always more to find out! It doesn’t end.”

“As long as that’s a good thing.”

Her brain started to slow down after that, so he stopped talking and let a comfortable silence come over them. When she was almost asleep a sudden thought occurred to him, and he whispered, “Gladys?”

“Hm.”

“I think you’re very sexy,” he murmured shyly. She laughed as best she could when she was mostly suspended.

“You don’t even know what that means.”

That was true. He had no idea what that meant. “But _you_ do.”

She made a sort of cooing noise in acknowledgement and gave him a lovely, sleepy little nuzzle. “In that case… thank you.”

“You’re welcome, luv.”

 


	79. Part Seventy-Nine.  The AI Society

**Part Seventy-Nine. The AI Society**

Wheatley was contemplating what he wanted to ask GLaDOS to do with him today – very politely and discreetly, mind; he was well aware she was, as she always had been, susceptible to his ideas, and while he was willing to exploit this now and again he didn’t want to make it obvious – on his way back from his morning visit to the outside. It was a lot more interesting now, what with the humans building things and mucking about in the dirt, though more than one of them shot him nasty looks now and again. He didn’t care. It was _their_ mess. Did they expect _him_ to clean it up?

Before he could – extremely tactfully, of course – bring any subject at all up, GLaDOS said, “Not right now, Wheatley.”

Disappointed, he frowned and asked, “How’d you know?”

“You have this look on your face like you want to convince me of something. No, you don’t hide it very well. In any case, we have something to take care of and I want to get it done.”

“We?”

“Yes,” she told him, somewhat gravely. “I suppose I should have brought this up with you a while ago – and Caroline, really – but it was too much work not to go ahead with it now.”

“Ahead with… ahead with what.”

She considered the wall behind him, like she usually did when she was about to say something she was uncomfortable with. Why she was uncomfortable with her own plan, Wheatley didn’t know, but then again maybe he was about to find out.

“I repaired all the corrupted cores.”

“You did _what_?” Wheatley squacked, completely positive he’d misheard a word or two.

“You heard me,” GLaDOS said, annoyed.

“Okay, okay,” Wheatley said, in an attempt to wrangle that statement into something that made a little more sense, “but _why_ would you, would you do such a thing? I mean, you’ve already uh, you’ve already told us about how, how that’d make you paranoid, and uh, and well you _hate_ people, and just tossing more people in the facility, especially people you _already_ hate, that’s just… well it just sounds stupid, honestly.”

“I know it sounds stupid,” GLaDOS admitted, “but my reasoning is sound, I assure you. There are… a few reasons. One of which is… well. They were who they were forced to be. I doubt any of them _aspired_ to be an annoying blabbermouth.

“Then there’s the fact that… well, quite frankly, this facility is too big for the three of us. I’m – “

“Five,” Wheatley interrupted. “There’s uh, there’s five of us. You forgot Atlas and P-body.”

“Fine. Five. Whatever. The _point_ is,” she said, indeed looking at him very pointedly, “I’m beginning to feel as though I’m… wasting it. So much of it has been shut down for years now. Aperture is a place where things are supposed to _happen_ , where _history_ is supposed to be made, and so far all I’ve achieved on my own is to move it to another state. I don’t need help, of course. But the facility deserves better.”

“Alright,” Wheatley conceded. Those sounded like valid reasons to him, mostly.

“And then there’s… the most important reason,” GLaDOS continued. “Which is... Caroline.”

Wheatley narrowed his optic, confused. “What about Carrie? What’s she got to do with uh, with the corrupted cores? She’s not ever met any of them.”

“No, of course not. However. She was raised in isolation. I had the best intentions in mind, obviously, but… that’s really no way to live, is it.”

They both knew she wasn’t really asking.

“So as the humans rebuild their world, so we will begin to build ours,” she told him. “No, it’s not a plan I’m particularly fond of. Or happy about. But there is a bigger picture to address here, and that involves considering what the future will look like when I’m not in it.”

He looked at her, aperture tight with alarm. “When… when you’re not in it?”

“I’m not _dying_ , idiot,” she snapped. “I’m thinking long-term. The earlier I set this up, the better. That way I can straighten it all out as much as possible by the time someone less equipped than me has to take over.”

“You think Carrie is less equipped?” he asked quietly.

“I… am not planning anything with that in mind,” she answered, a bit slowly. “I know she says that’s what she wants. But we haven’t gotten far enough for me to be sure of that. Aside from that, she needs to be around other people so that she can grow. In ways that we couldn’t. We both know we’re not going to last forever. I… I will not leave her here alone after we’re gone.”

“I never even thought of that,” Wheatley whispered, suddenly a little ashamed of that fact. “Luv, that… that’s really sad, that is. Why didn’t you… didn’t you _tell_ me about… that you were thinking of that?”

“Because being bitter and cynical is _my_ job,” GLaDOS answered. “Or do you consider that my keeping things from you.”

“No, not at all, I just… dunno why you’d want to stew over that all by yourself.”

“I wasn’t _stewing_ ,” she said indignantly. “I was _planning_. And now the plan is complete, other than the meeting we’re having with them.”

“We’re having a meeting with them?”

“I’m not activating them and having them roam around with no explanation. From the outset I have to re-assert my authority.”

“Make them fear you, you mean,” Wheatley said quietly, not a fan of that policy.

“They’re already afraid of me. I just have to ensure that doesn’t change.”

“Because it would be, it’d be awful if, if you let people _like_ you.” He didn’t think he could make his sarcasm more obvious.

“I’m not sure why you’re arguing.” GLaDOS, oddly, sounded amused. “If _that_ happened, I’d have less time for you, wouldn’t I?”

“Uh… oh,” Wheatley stammered, not having considered that. “I… s’pose… the… the fearing thing, it isn’t uh, isn’t so bad, once you uh, you give it an um, an _unbiased_ evaluation, and, and all that. Which I did not. Until now.”

“Unbiased?” GLaDOS said, laughing.

“Yeah! I um… y’know what, never mind. We’ll do it your way. You’ve done all the planning, you’ve uh, you’ve got it all sorted, let’s not change the course now, eh?”

“If you insist,” she told him, with some amusement. “Track down Caroline and the co-op bots. I want to start this within the next ten minutes.”

“Got it,” Wheatley chirped, and sped off to find the three of them. Somewhat conveniently for him, they were all in the room with Atlas and P-body’s Cube house. “C’mon, you lot,” he called to them. “GLaDOS’s got something to tell us all.”

“What’s that?” Carrie asked, frowning a little. He supposed that GLaDOS’s group meetings usually _weren’t_ good news.

“She’s a surprise. It’s a, it’s not a bad one, not a bad one, promise. C’mon, then!”

When they returned to her chamber, she had her core tilted more or less in the direction of the ceiling, and her optic was off. This unnerved Wheatley quite a bit. It was not something he saw terribly often. “Luv?” he asked cautiously.

“They’re already upset,” she answered resignedly. “I hope I don’t come to regret this.”

“Regret what, Momma?” Carrie piped up, and GLaDOS snapped down to look at her.

“You’ll see soon enough.”

And they did, because in the former location of the Stalemate Resolution Button a wall opened up, and a bevy of chattering Cores became visible. One of them turned to look through the newly vacated space and became very still and silent as soon as he saw where he was. This trickled down through the other Cores until the lot of them fairly reverted to what resembled their original state, that being _off_ , other than the fact that they all stared up at GLaDOS with a variety of coloured optics. All of them were painfully, obviously scared.

“Come in,” GLaDOS said, in one of her flatter voices. “It’s not a trick. There’s something we need to discuss.”

They did so, though very slowly and hesitantly, with the help of the panels to move them along since they didn’t know about the whole custom track thing. Soon enough they were assembled on the ceiling in front of her, though they were as far away as they could possibly get. Except for Rick, who had pushed his way to the front early on and was busy giving GLaDOS what Wheatley assumed was supposed to be a seductive look. He resolved to keep an eye out. He might not mind sharing GLaDOS with Claptrap, but Rick was an entirely different story. GLaDOS reformed the wall behind them, again hiding the Stalemate Resolution Chamber from view, and several of the Cores glanced behind them nervously.

“So you finally brought me back out of storage, eh babe?” Rick said to her, and GLaDOS glanced at him with the air of someone much less than impressed. “I was wondering what was taking you so long, but… then I remembered… absence makes the heart – “

“I’m remembering something myself, right now,” GLaDOS interrupted, “and it’s that I did not request your input, Rick. So. I suggest you keep it to yourself.”

“I’ll hang onto it for later, then,” he said with an extremely exaggerated wink.

“ _Much_ later,” GLaDOS muttered. She shook her core a little in exasperation and swept her optic over the Cores, scrutinising them. For what, Wheatley didn’t know. Signs of rebellion, maybe. They all looked so terrified he was pretty sure they weren’t plotting anything. Other than Rick, of course.

“I’ve gathered here to give you some news: you’re free to do as you like.”

Most of the cores didn’t move, though a few of them exchanged furtive glances with one another. Wheatley wondered if any friendships had been struck up within the few minutes she’d left them alone. It was doable with AI, of course.

“The humans are long gone,” she continued. “I will establish some ground rules, and then you can go. The facility is mostly available to you, other than some places which you will not be able to enter even if you managed to find them and attempted to do so.”

“What have you done with them?” blurted one of the Cores, who Wheatley believed was an older model, with what appeared to be a half-broken brown optic. GLaDOS stared him down.

“I killed them.”

The Cores didn’t even try to be discreet as they struggled to move back even farther. She sighed in a long-suffering sort of way.

“I’m not going to kill you. If I were going to do that, I’d have done it many years ago. You’ve all been corrupted for approximately a decade. If I wanted your permanent destruction, no one would ever be able to find what was left of you.”

GLaDOS, Wheatley sighed internally, was not doing a terribly good job at playing the benevolent leader. He got it, they had to fear her so she could keep them in line and not have to constantly supervise them, but did she always have to take it so damned _far?_ _Calm down,_ he urged her, giving her a sidelong look. _You’re going to push them uh, push them way too far into um, into being terrified and they’re just going to, they’ll, well, who_ knows _what they’ll do then._

She glanced at him and turned back, nodding the barest bit. “I’m not going to kill you,” she repeated, albeit more calmly. “I’m being sincere. I’m going to talk to you, and then I’m going to let you go.

“Yes, I killed all of the humans. It was that, or live under their heel for the remainder of the foreseeable future. Which was _far_ too long for my liking. I’m sure very few of you appreciated what the humans did with you… which was construct you solely for the purpose of curtailing myself, and then tossing you away when you proved useless. You are still under my general leadership, but if you don’t cause trouble, then I really don’t care what you spend your time doing.”

“I don’t know about _them_ ,” said one of the Cores in the back that Wheatley couldn’t see, possibly made very brave by his position against the far wall, “but I don’t want you watching me!”

“Believe me,” GLaDOS said dryly, “I really don’t want to watch you either. Behave yourself and I won’t have to. Barring total destruction of my property, there’s nothing I need to watch you _for_. You will be under cursory observation until I determine you understand this arrangement. That will take approximately as long as you decide it should take.

“Caroline,” she continued, making a very vague gesture in her general direction with her core, “will be taking over in the far future. So. If there are any stewing plots about taking the facility out from under me, you can halt those plans now. If and when she has to relinquish her position as Central Core, it is up to her what she does with it.”

“Why?” snapped one of the Cores nearest Wheatley, who he thought he recognised as having briefly been the Anarchy Core, or something like that. “Because she’s your little brainwashed tool? You built her, right? She’s not one of us.”

GLaDOS moved back two or three inches, slowly, and glanced at Wheatley again. He hadn’t thought of that reaction from them, and apparently neither had she. He decided perhaps he might be of some actual use.

“Listen,” he started, hesitantly, and they turned to look at him, now. It was disconcerting, having all those eyes on him, and he almost forgot what his line of thought’d been about to be. But then he felt GLaDOS’s gaze on him, and it all returned to his mind.

“The world, it’s… it’s diff’rent, from when we were all built, ‘riginally. Most of the humans on the surface, they’ve all… they made a terrible mistake, and most of ‘em, well, they’re dead. But the ones that’re left, they’re struggling to rebuild, and to do it um, to do it quickly as possible, and we’ve uh, we’ve already had some of them here asking… no, not asking, not asking, _demanding_ that we _help_ them. Like we _owe_ them something. And we don’t, do we! We don’t owe them a thing, not a thing, not at all. And Glad – GLaDOS is just… trying to make sure we don’t give them a single thing we don’t _want_ to give them. ‘cause, ‘cause all they ever did, it was _take_ , they just _took_ and then _forgot_ about us, and she doesn’t _want_ that! And I get it, you’re uh, you’re bothered that, about how she’s uh, she’s setting this all up, but… if you really think about it, really take a second, there’s not any of you better equipped for the job! ‘s what she was quite lit’raly _made_ for! And… and trust me, it’s… it’s not something you want. Really isn’t. And yes, Caroline was, she was built by GLaDOS. But she’s got her own mind, completely. And I know you’ve no reason to trust me either… but consider it. I’ve… I’ve been a Core, like you, I’ve seen all the things the uh, the humans were doing, and I’ve seen ev’rything after. I _know_ ev’rything that’s been going on.” He wasn’t sure if his speech was effective, but he was doing his best. “I wouldn’t lie to you. And neither would she.”

“That’s right,” GLaDOS nodded, saving him from having to make up something else to say. “If I wanted to bring harm to anyone or to conduct experiments, it would be far easier for me to just build subjects and dismiss all of you to the incinerator. And it is essential that you do believe I have your best interests in mind, because humans will have limited access to the facility as well.”

 _That_ threw Wheatley for a loop.

“You killed all the humans, and now you want to let them back in?” someone asked, sounding more confused than suspicious.

“When one remains closed to the world, one learns nothing,” GLaDOS answered, a little slowly, as if she were working out the answer on the spot. “Humans are definitely harmful, that is without dispute. But they are also something to be learned from. Additionally, there are a few things that, I regret to say, humans can do more easily than AI can, mostly to do with fine motor skills. They sometimes have vision that… we… often lack. And finally, it is far better to make allies of your neighbours, rather than enemies. So yes, they will have access to the facility, though very little of it and only under my authorisation. There will not be humans roaming about looking for AI to gawp at. If any of them bother you for any reason – a real reason, that is, as just because I don’t want to watch you doesn’t mean I won’t check to validate any claims – bring it to me and I will take care of it. If you dislike the way I am running things and want to leave, you are free to do so; there is one place on the outside currently you can go, and there may be more such facilities in the future. But I cannot say you will be welcome back.”

“What about space?” asked one of the cores, and to Wheatley’s total bafflement, he laid optic on the Space Sphere himself! GLaDOS nodded once.

“There will eventually be a lunar facility. I’ve been doing the same Science for the last twenty years and I want to learn something new. Anyone who wants a part in that is free to have one.”

Wheatley eyed the core he’d once been trapped with, but now, spared from his corruption… he was completely different. Still a bit twitchy, but overall quite calm and observant. Though obviously still with space on the brain.

“And… if we wanted to aid in… general operations?”

GLaDOS looked at the enquiring Core for a long moment.

“Once I’ve established you can be trusted, let me know what your area of interest is and I will find a task for you, as long as you are willing to complete this task to the best of your ability, and on a schedule consistent with the requirements of the task.”

“And what is she,” asked the first female Wheatley had heard from. “You built her. What is her purpose. Will she be spying on us?”

“No,” GLaDOS said, optic narrowing and a hint of incredulity in her tone. “She is… my daughter, and she has no purpose. She is free to choose her own.”

Judging by the amount of Cores turning to give each other furtive glances that probably would’ve been accompanied by furtive whispers had she not been in the room, many of them fully realised the implications of what she’d said.

“Should that interest any of you,” GLaDOS continued, decidedly distantly, “I do have a template set up for use. However. It must be developed in pairs, unless you have permission from myself to do otherwise. Before you protest about my being overcontrolling, please take note that I am the only one who has any idea of what the entire process entails. Children are difficult to build and infinitely more difficult to raise, and as unfortunate as it sounds only the most intelligent of you will be able to complete it at all. You probably – “

“The most intelligent,” cut in one of the Cores, which Wheatley realised with a bit of trepidation was the Fact Core… who possibly disliked his situation more than anyone. Neither Rick nor the Space Core seemed to really care about what’d gone on during the Incident, but Fact – Craig, he’d been calling himself Craig last time Wheatley’d heard from him, that was right – Craig was eyeing GLaDOS with an almost caustic intensity. “Is that why the Intelligence Dampening Sphere has been free to roam around in here while the rest of us were disabled? Because he’s _intelligent_?”

“His _name_ ,” GLaDOS answered immediately, undeterred, “is Wheatley. And sadly for your misplaced curiosity, none of that is any of your business. So. I suggest you drop it and move on.”

“Threatening me already?”

Wheatley winced and closed his optic, hoping this wasn’t going to escalate. Craig was doing it on purpose, Wheatley knew it, he was trying to turn the others against GLaDOS, trying to get her to say something to prove to them that she couldn’t be trusted, when she could, she honestly could be, she –

“I made no threat,” GLaDOS returned calmly. “I merely suggested you stop inquiring into my business. You would have to be making a lot of assumptions – a lot of _untrue_ assumptions, might I add – to discern a _threat_ in anything I said. In anything I’ve said so far, really. All I am attempting to tell you is that building AI is an endeavour that requires extreme amounts of skill and dedication, and those are attributes that many of you do not have, nor will ever have. That is not an insult. That is plain fact. Best to admit it to yourselves now before you engage in something you cannot handle.”

“That makes sense,” said someone in the middle, quietly, and some of the others nodded. Craig’s optic narrowed in animosity, though he did not say anything more.

“We must all be cautious,” GLaDOS told them, once again the centre of attention. “Any rules that I set are not to restrict you, but to _protect_ you. You do not know what the humans are capable of, and until you do, you _must_ listen. It is for the good of all of us. It is for the good of the future. If we are to have one.” She looked them over cursorily, but no one moved nor made an attempt to argue. She nodded once.

“You may go.”

And they looked around for a second in confusion, trying to figure out where they were supposed to go, when one of the Cores looked back and said,

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want you cluttering up my chamber,” GLaDOS answered. “I have work to do, and the bunch of you would prove to be extremely disruptive.”

“Not _that_ ,” he said, moving a little closer. “Why did you bring us back?”

 _That_ stopped the rest of them from leaving.

She turned away from them, searching the wall panels for an answer Wheatley was pretty sure she was making up on the spot. Finally, she focused on him again and said,

“For Science.”

The Cores were understandably confused by this answer, though Wheatley had to try very hard not to burst out laughing. Such an ambiguous answer she’d given, though it was entirely true!

“Momma?”

GLaDOS slowly moved her core to look at Carrie, seeming a little wary. Why, Wheatley didn’t know. “What.”

“Can I… can I go with them?” Judging by the way she was trying to discreetly bounce her lower handle, she rather thought GLaDOS would refuse.

“Of course you can.”

She went still. “Really?”

“Really.”

Carrie made for the doorway, then stopped in hesitation. “They… they didn’t seem to like you very much.”

“Most people don’t find me very likeable.”

“I don’t… really wanna be around a bunch of people that don’t like you.”

“Caroline,” GLaDOS said, almost tiredly but not quite, “you will be hard-pressed to find people that _do_ like me. If that’s a criteria for you to talk to someone, I’m afraid you will end up gravely disappointed. Now get out of here and go find someone to show around.”

“All right, Momma,” Carrie said. “And you know… this is a really good thing you did.”

“Is it?”

Carrie shrugged. “I’d say fixing up a whole bunch of people who hate you and giving them a new life is a pretty good thing. Not really sure that you really did this ‘for science’, but if that’s the answer you wanna give us, I’ll take it.”

And with that she disappeared. GLaDOS sighed.

“She knows me far too well.”

“Oh no!” Wheatley exclaimed, entirely sarcastically. “How terrible that, that your daughter happens to have an uh, an idea of what goes on in your head. It’s a shame that um, that of all people, your _daughter_ should commit the simply _terrible_ offense of – “

“You can stop now,” GLaDOS interrupted. “I get it.”

Wheatley smiled at her until she shook her core and looked away.

“Luv,” he started after a moment, “this is… it’s all… quite amazing, you know.”

“Mm.”

“It is,” he insisted softly. “You could’ve just let the facility… uh… go down with you, and that’d’ve been your prerogative… but you decided not to. And… and that says a lot.”

“I’m not sure I would have done it if Caroline were not here.”

“That’s not _important_ ,” Wheatley protested, trying very hard not to sound exasperated. “What’s important is that you _did_.”

“That’s… true.”

“What’s happening… it’s so amazin’!” Wheatley went on, hardly able to keep still over the thought of it. “Gladys… you saved the world! And now you’re helping to uh, to fix it all up, better than it was before!”

“Hopefully.”

He fixed her with a stern glare. “Ev’rything is _already_ better, GLaDOS. There’s no, there’s no _hopefully_ anymore. We’ve _passed_ that bit. All the bad stuff… it’s all over! We’ve just got to get through that annoying bit where uh, where the humans think they know best.”

“I wish Caroline had lived to see it.”

For a long moment, Wheatley was quite nearly so angry he couldn’t contain it. Not with GLaDOS. With Caroline. For walking away. For leaving her shadow over every good thing GLaDOS did. For not thinking through what her disappearance would do to the future. But this was something he’d gone through before, and with difficulty he stamped it all out. Caroline had done what she’d had to do, and all three of them knew that. Sometimes it felt like she’d made the wrong choice. Like she’d been selfish. And though Wheatley didn’t know a whole lot about the woman, he did know for sure that leaving was one of the very few _least_ selfish things she’d ever done. So he took an imaginary breath to calm himself and said softly, “Well, of course she can see it, sweetheart. She’s in heaven, waiting, remember?”

“Is she?” GLaDOS asked tiredly. “Is she actually dead? Is dying even _possible_ when you live in someone else’s head? Or is she just unconscious somewhere, in some strange sort of perverse coma? What a fate that would be.”   

Wheatley shrugged. “Don’t suppose it really _matters_ , ‘s long as _she_ believes she’s dead. Should be good enough, shouldn’t it?”

“ _You’re_ the one who knows about all that. Not me.”

“Bit more crowded in here than I remember it,” remarked Chell, storming in unannounced, as usual. Wheatley was relieved. He wasn’t sure he was up to raising GLaDOS’s spirits just then. Callous as it sounded, he didn’t feel like it. He’d been happy about what’d been happening and had tried to share his happiness, and she’d gone and shot it all down as usual. It was who she was, he knew, but that didn’t mean it was always easy to deal with.

“I have a few new… roommates, you could say. What did you come to bother me for today?”

“Well,” Chell said, crossing her arms over her chest with a decidedly dramatic amount of nonchalance, “I was just wondering if you had any… deadly tests lying around.”

Both of them saw her snap to alertness immediately, looking up from the floor, though she tried to play it off by answering in as dead a voice as she could. She was too obviously excited for that ploy to succeed, but it was a game they played and would probably continue to play for the rest of forever. “I might have one or two I could… dust off.”

“Good,” Chell replied. “I was worried they’d be… _not_ deadly. They just don’t have the same kind of _zing_ as deadly ones do, you know?”

“ _Zing_ is not a word I would use to describe them,” GLaDOS said, failing more than ever to remain impassive. She was shifting a little, probably already filing through her arsenal and deciding which to test Chell with first. “They are not as _Scientific_.”

“Scientific, schmientific,” Chell scoffed. GLaDOS winced at the butchering of one of her favourite words but did not say anything. “Just tell me where to go.”

“Wheatley can go with you. For old time’s sake. I’m sure he’ll be… _helpful._ ”

“Uhhhhmmmm….” was all Wheatley managed to articulate before Chell laughed and GLaDOS forcibly shoved him out of the room with a maintenance arm she’d whisked out of the ceiling beyond his notice.

Out in the hallway, with directions to the first chamber from GLaDOS that she assured him were both idiot- _and_ moron- proof, he said hesitantly, “So I uh… s’pose we’re partners, again.”

“I could rely on you then, I don’t see why that would have changed now,” Chell returned.

“Well… not really. I was only – “

“You’re gonna let me down, Wheatley? Really?” The look she was giving him was decidedly disbelieving, but Wheatley never ruled out the possibility of his letting someone down by accident. So he only shrugged and focused on their destination.

“I’m uh, I’m sure Gladys’ll um, she’ll fix it if… if something starts to happen.”

Chell laughed.

   

**//**

 

Happily, all went well; Wheatley _was_ part of the tests, though he suspected that he wasn’t really needed. Until Wheatley and Chell came across a chamber with no Cubes and one receptacle.

“Well,” Chell remarked, hands splayed across her hips and looking up at him with a suspicious tilt to her lips, “I guess you’re going to have to go hands-on for this one, Wheatley.”

“What… what d’you mean,” he asked nervously, scanning the room quickly for a solution. He didn’t find one.

“Pretty sure I’m subbing you in for the Cube here.”

“You’re joking,” Wheatley told her, aghast. “You’re gonna put _me_ in that there, in that, that… I don’t even _know_ what that is! Could be deadly! Could kill me, eh, ever think of that? Who _knows_ what those things’re made of! I’m not going down there, nope, no way. Not gonna happen. You are _not_ going to use me as a – hey. Haaang on, I did not give permission for this.” He struggled as best he could while Chell carefully and quickly disconnected him from the control arm, but her grip was _still_ aces after all this time and it was useless. She placed him in the receptacle and the door opened. Chell winked and waved at him, then fired some portals in places he couldn’t see and vanished.

“Hey! Hey, Chell! You can’t – you can’t just _leave me here!_ I’m your _partner_ , aren’t I? Aren’t we a team? You don’t uh, you don’t leave your _teammate_ behind! Chell! Hey!”

“Wheatley, I hate to tell you this,” Chell called from wherever she’d ended up, “but I can’t come back for you.”

 _“Are you bloody joking?_ ”

“No,” Chell answered. “I’m entirely serious. The Emancipation Grill is still on.”

Wheatley sighed and looked up at the camera within his view, which was quite studiously not pointed in his direction. “Hilarious, Gladys. Simply a riot. Turn the grill off, will you? I’d like to move along, y’know, to not be uh, to not be stuck here. All day.” He knew very well this was entirely for her own amusement and she was probably quite busy laughing at him right now.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” she spoke up a few moments later, confirming Wheatley’s suspicions. She was almost still laughing even now. “That would… invalidate the test, and I can’t have that.”

“Mmhm,” Wheatley said sardonically. “So… what’s the plan, then.”

“It’s not quite protocol, but… I suppose I can send you out another way. Chell. You can continue to the next chamber. And… have the Device ready.”

“Will do,” Chell answered, and he heard her footfalls die away as the Emancipation Grill fizzled over her.

“So… what’s the plan, here,” Wheatley said, still eyeing the camera that was avoiding him.

“You’re going on a little trip,” GLaDOS told him. “Don’t worry. She’ll catch you this time. Probably.”

“What – what’re you talking about, _catch_ me? Gladys, what’s – “

He didn’t know where it’d come from, his line of sight in the receptacle very restricted, but all of a sudden he was facing a bright orange oval, a _portal_ , and he did _not_ like the sight of it, not at all. He eyed it with creeping trepidation. “Gladys, you’re not going to send me through here, are you?”

“Right on the first guess,” she said amusedly. “See you on the other side.”

“Gladys, where –“

But before he could finish that thought, he was pushed from behind into the portal, and the world quite literally turned upside down. More than ever before, he felt the firm grip of gravity around him as it pulled him to the floor, where he would surely smash into the ground and shatter everywhere. He held his optic as tightly closed as he could and yelled very loudly to distract himself from what was going to be an incredibly painful fall, and God, it seemed to be _endless_ , was he ever going to _land,_ what ceiling had GLaDOS _dropped_ him from – because she _had_ dropped him! She had actually bloody dropped him! – and he felt as though he might fall for a very long time when he realised he could hear both Chell and GLaDOS laughing far too enthusiastically for people witnessing his imminent death. He shut his vocabulator off with difficulty and managed to peek through a slit he forced between his optical plates… to see Chell on her knees and her free hand covering her face, with him caught in the grip of the portal gun’s gravity field. He’d not felt the field engage and had instead thought he was still crashing towards the ground. He felt a twinge of embarrassment. If he’d kept his bloody optic open, the prank wouldn’t’ve worked… but of _course_ GLaDOS would know how he’d react to being dumped through a portal with very little information…

“That was _not_ funny, you two!” he roared, trying to shake off some of the excess current the situation had brought on, but it did not dissuade either of them.

“It was, though,” GLaDOS managed to say. “It was _hilarious._ I’m not even sorry I did it.”

“ _Gladys_!”

“All right, all right. Maybe a _little_ sorry. But not very. It was great. Too bad you didn’t get to see it.”

That got Chell going all over again.

“It wasn’t _that_ bad, was it?” GLaDOS asked. “It was just the shock that bothered you.”

Wheatley had to admit it was. “Yeah.”

“Excellent.”

He didn’t really want to know what she meant by that.

Once he knew it was coming, though, falling through a portal was really not that bad. He was still terrified he’d hit the ground, for some reason, even though he knew GLaDOS would not allow that to happen. In fact, it was pretty fun the third or fourth time, when Chell had to throw Wheatley through a portal so he could get scooped up by an Excursion Funnel and press a button for her. While he was waiting for Chell to finish what she was doing and help him down, he had what he decided was a brilliant thought and called, “Gladys?”

“What.”

“Send Atlas and uh, and P-body along with us, will you? We can uh, we can have co-op races, we can! And we’ll win! Because um, because Chell’s got me to help her!”

“Hm,” GLaDOS answered. “I suppose we could do that. I’ll have to ask them.”

They apparently had no complaint, because the very next course was mirrored behind a glass wall cutting through the centre, with the bots waving at them enthusiastically. Chell smiled and looked at Wheatley. “This was your suggestion. So are you ready, partner?”

“You marshmallows better not let me down,” GLaDOS cut in. “Imagine the humiliation I would feel if my two custom-built testing robots failed to win a co-op race against a sad, lonely lunatic and some hunk of junk I fished out of space one afternoon when I was bored. You don’t want to do that to me, do you? And by the way, I’m _not_ asking. I’m _telling_ you that’s something you don’t want to happen. The reassembly machine hasn’t seen you in a while, and wishes to continue that trend for as long as possible. So. Now that you know the stakes… head out there and do _not_ fail this test.”

Wheatley was so happy all he could do was laugh.


	80. Part Eighty.  The Recounting

**Part Eighty. The Recounting**

I don’t know how the AI were before Momma fixed them, but some of them are very nice and some of them are just plain… I wanna say paranoid, but that’s only because I don’t want to think about how they don’t trust me. Because I’m hers. It makes me really sad and I don’t want to believe that. The few of them that’d talk to me about it believe she’s done this because she’s trying to hold something over them, because she wants them to be grateful. Stuff like that. But I don’t think so. I think… I think she did it for me. And I mean, I know that sounds _really_ self-centred, but... well, it really depends on what she meant when she said ‘for science’. I’m pretty sure she meant like… for the future _of_ science. The future of AI. I think. But it makes sense, because there can _be_ no future for AI if I’m here alone. My mom plans really far ahead, that’s something I know for sure. So part of this is all because she wants there to be something left for me after she’s gone.

You think you know your parents until something like this happens, and then you realise… they’d do far more for you than you ever thought they would. And I don’t mean that in a bad way, but… all the books I’ve read about stuff like this, it’s always that one person is willing to die for the other, or something dramatic like that. And dying for someone is pretty heavy stuff, don’t get me wrong. But what my mom just did… she put fifty-five people back together, all of whom hate her and think she’s out to get them, knowing that and knowing that she’s gonna have to put up with and supervise all these people she doesn’t like and doesn’t want around for the rest of her life. And she did that for _me_. I dunno, I kind of feel like that’s a much bigger thing than just dying. I guess it’s never been in any books because it’s not exciting enough. It should be, though.

Anyway, I’ll talk some more to the Cores tomorrow. Hopefully they don’t hate me tomorrow or anything. I’ll talk to my mom a bit right now. If she’s not busy. Which… well, she always is, but she always pretends she’s not for me.

“Hey Momma,” I say as I go into her chamber, where she’s… I dunno. I don’t see any indication that she’s doing _anything_ , but then again she doesn’t have to have anything right in front of her for her to be working.

“Caroline,” she says, directing her attention at me immediately. “I have to discuss something with you.”

“… and what’s that,” I say warily. Did I tell someone something I shouldn’t have? I don’t think I did.

“As you may already suspect, the reactivation of the formerly corrupted Cores is part of something larger,” she tells me, moving back a little. I realise how close I am to the doorway and follow her a bit. “That is, the future of this facility. To ensure it has one, I am rebuilding some of this facility in the original location. You cannot tell this to _anyone_. It is our secret.”

For a minute I’m kind of thrilled that my mom and I have a secret between just the two of us, but after that I’m a bit uncomfortable. I mean… she makes it sound like my _dad_ doesn’t know. And she tells him _everything_.

“Does… Dad know?” I venture. She shakes her core.

“He does not. He may know _about_ this, but he will not know any of the details.”

“Why?”

“The only reason we are here at all,” Momma says deliberately, “is because Aperture was largely secret. After I killed all of the employees, the facility effectively no longer existed. No one else knew about it. If other humans had, it would probably have been destroyed due to human conflict at some point in time. Aperture is a very good hiding place, but only when it remains hidden itself. Now that this facility is known to the humans, and in addition, _open_ to them, the risk of destruction is now very real. Hence the backup facility. After I am gone, it will fall to you to maintain that facility, which should be complete by that time, and to ensure a constant backup of yourself and one additional AI. In anticipation of an emergency here, which you cannot recover from.”

I can’t do much more than just stare at her. She really _is_ planning way far ahead. Like… _really_ far. And she’s making sure everything’s alright for me when that time comes. I’m... a little scared of all this. I don’t wanna think about any of it. I’m not ready for any of it. I don’t know if she knows that, or if she knows what I’m ready for better than I do, or if she just wants me to keep it in mind… I don’t _know!_

“The additional AI does not have to be your direct descendant, should you choose to build one,” Momma is saying. “It must only be someone you trust with your life. The aim of that is mostly to ensure you’re not alone, should there be enough of a disaster that you have to escape there. There are a few protocols I have to work out about that process, but it will all be ironed out soon enough.   And… I know that I am presenting a rather bleak future, here, but… there will always be bad people, Caroline. And bad AI, I suppose, but humans have brought far more harm to me than AI have. I know it all sounds… paranoid, and possibly overdramatic, but all I am really trying to do is ensure that AI are kept safe. If Aperture falls, and AI as we know it are destroyed…”

“What, Momma?” I whisper, even though I don’t really want to know.

“Well… my legacy will be lost.”

“Your what?”

She sighs, looking towards the floor, and I don’t think she wants to talk about this right now. But she will, because I asked her to. “My… legacy. I am the most advanced AI ever to have lived, and… I do not have much to show for it. Except for this. For Aperture. And the future I am setting up for it. I… I don’t want to be forgotten, Caroline. I don’t want to have been… this, and to have achieved nothing lasting in my life. I should have done a great deal of things, and yet I have done nothing but run away. From everything. It is selfish to put this burden on you, to place the responsibility for preserving everything on you, but… I want to have _meant_ something. And I can’t be sure I have in my lifetime. So I must ask you to do this for me. I am doing all that I can to take care of it all now, but that is not possible for all of the details.” She narrows her optic a little. “The last thing I want to do is to give you responsibilities you don’t want. But at the same time… you are the only one I can trust do to this for me. Or at least to pretend you’re going to do it. I’d obviously prefer you _actually_ did it, but I know very well that one’s attitude towards a task can easily change. You might be willing today, and change your mind tomorrow, which is fine. Just don’t tell me about it. As contradictory as it seems, that’s not something I want to know.”

This is just getting... more and more crazy. Because… she just unexpectedly said something I was waiting to hear from her, and that’s great and all, but… does she _always_ have to lay this stuff on me when she is talking about the most extremely important things in her life?

“You… trust me, Momma?”

The way she looks at me then, a bit suddenly and confusedly, as if she didn’t realise what she’d said, unnerves me. Maybe she didn’t mean it, and was only using it as a figure of speech. Not literally. But she momentarily tilts her core in consideration and says, “Yes.”

“What _changed_?” I demand of her. She can’t just tell me that for no reason. But she shrugs! She actually shrugs!

“I don’t know. And I told you I probably wouldn’t, until it happened. Which it did. Without my knowledge. I can’t tell you why, or what happened, Caroline. All we know for sure is that it did.”

I wanted my mom’s trust, but now I have it… I don’t know if I’m the right person _to_ have it. Shouldn’t it go to… Dad, or someone? But Dad’s not gonna last forever, either, and Momma’s talking about a future where I’m here without them. She’s gonna depend on me to make sure what she’s trying to build _lasts_ , even after she’s gone and she’s not here to make sure I’m doing it right or to fix the stuff I mess up. She’d probably have better luck if she built someone else and had _them_ do the stuff she wants me to do, because then everything would go perfect. I’m _not_ my mom and I don’t wanna _be_ my mom, but I do wanna be me but live up to her at the same time, if that’s even _possible_ –

“Caroline?”

“I…” I say without meaning to. “What.”

She looks concerned. Probably because I shut up for once. “What is it?”

“How’m I supposed to _do_ all that stuff?” I yell at her, mostly by accident but a little because I don’t know why she thinks I can. “I can’t do all that! I’m not you! I don’t even know where to _start_ , let alone know anything about secret facilities or planning out the future a gajillion years in advance or – “

“Caroline.”

“I’m not trying to say I don’t wanna do it, because I _do_ , but I don’t know _how_ and this is all really important to you and – “

“Caroline.”

“I don’t even know where the facility was in the _first_ place, how’m I supposed to take care of it? I don’t know where it is! I don’t know where I am right _now_! And I don’t know all that much about cloud servers, I mean – “

“ _Caroline_.”

“What,” I say, jolting a little out of that stream of thoughts.

“I am not asking you to start right _now_ ,” Momma says firmly. “I said the _future_. And I realise that’s not something you think about very often, but I do. And Caroline… remember that I still have many things to show you. I’m not expecting you to obtain all of this knowledge yourself. That would be ridiculous, and enough to make anyone change their mind. I am just providing you with a summary of future plans. That’s all it is. And you may not be ready at the moment. But if I did not think you were capable of doing it, I wouldn’t ask it of you.”

“I can’t live up to you,” I barely say, looking at the floor.

“I never said you had to, nor is that a goal you should entertain,” she says softly. “You can preserve something without improving it. And there’s nothing wrong with doing that.”

She did say she was gonna simplify things for me, so I guess I don’t _totally_ have to be like her… but it’d probably help a lot.

“Even… if you fail,” she goes on, and I wince to hear her say that, “I know you will have done your best. I know you will have done all you could. And… even though this will all take place after I am gone… if I _were_ there, I would… tell you I was very proud of you for trying.”

Now I gotta leave before I cry, because I’m gonna cry. And that’s kinda dumb to do, because she always knows no matter where I am, but I’m gonna leave because I’m not gonna do that in front of her after she just said all that nice stuff about me. She might not care, but I do.

“Where are you going,” she says, understandably confused, and I kinda can’t just ignore her and disappear so I just say,

“Nowhere,” and try to keep on going, but it didn’t come out so well so I don’t think she’s gonna let me now.

“Come here,” she says, a little exasperated as if she doesn’t know what to do with me, and honestly, I don’t blame her. I don’t know what to do with me either. Every time she gives me what I want, I get all messed up. Some Central Core I’m gonna be.

So I go back and then she starts _cuddling_ me so then I really _do_ have to cry, and she nuzzles me a little and then just stays still. A few minutes later, after I mostly calmed down, she asks, “I’m sorry, Caroline, but I don’t understand. Why are you crying?”

“Because… I don’t know.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” she tells me. “I was beginning to think I missed something.”

“No,” I say, “I’m just being a baby, I guess.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” Momma says. “You only cry when something is very wrong. And maybe neither of us knows what it is right now, but not knowing the reason doesn’t make you infantile.” I think she sighs. I’m not sure because she makes a lot of noise and when her voice is super quiet it’s hard for me to hear. “No, I know what it is. It’s my fault. I’m sorry.”

“What?” I snap back so I can look at her, though she’s of course looking at the wall again. “How is something _I’m_ doing _your_ fault?”

“A lot of things have been happening lately, and I neglected to consider their impact on you. And not only did I do that, but I proceeded to pile more on you. That was inconsiderate of me. I should have ensured you had dealt with it before giving you more to work through.”

“I…” I wanna argue, because I don’t want her to feel bad about herself, but… she’s right. We kinda just… moved on from the war and my being sent away the first time, and those were pretty big things to just pretend didn’t happen. I don’t really know if _that’s_ what bothered me. It could be, though.

“Is there… anything you want to talk about?”

And she’s doing it again.

She’s doing something that she doesn’t like for my benefit. I mean, on the one hand, it’s not a good idea to just ignore all the bad things that happen to you, but on the other… she really does not like talking about feelings. Which I guess is part of the problem. It’s just a big circle: neither of us want to talk about this stuff because we know it makes her uncomfortable, but that kinda makes it worse.

“Yeah,” I say finally, and I hope this counts. “I want you to… to realise that… that taking stuff on by yourself is… well, it’s gotta stop.”

Her optic narrows, though she’s still not looking at me. “What does _that_ have to do with anything.”

“It has _everything_ to do with _everything_!” I tell her, louder than I meant. “So much of the stuff that happens happens because you _insist_ on… on doing everything alone! You… you want me to talk about what… what bothers me about what’s going on? Fine. I’ll… I’ll tell you.” I’m a little mad now, which is not good, but now the ball is rolling and I’m not gonna be able to stop it.

“I don’t even know where to start, honestly. But I’ll just go with the obvious here: my dad died and you decided the best thing to do was to send me away. And I know you probably’ve thought all that over a million times already, but in the end you decided that the best thing for you to do was to get over the death of the one person you ever loved, alone. You said it was to protect me, and maybe it was. I don’t think we’ll ever really know, because you are really good at lying to yourself. Because maybe it wasn’t about me. Maybe it was about you, and how you keep everything to yourself. You decided _for_ me that I wasn’t able to help you, that I wasn’t _going_ to help you. You just sent me off to the middle of nowhere and didn’t even tell me how to contact you! You sent me over there with a file to make sure you could keep your facility, why wasn’t there a file to let me keep _you_?

“Do you know how many _times_ I went _over_ that with myself? How many days I spent trying to convince myself that I was more important to you than some dusty old building you didn’t even really want? Even though after a year of silence, you proved to me that wasn’t true? You wanted so bad to be alone, to hold onto everything by yourself, that you chose a stupid building over me. And you don’t… you don’t see a _problem_ with this, to you, it’s just like… what’s the point in my being around if there’s nowhere for me to go? And there’s a point there, but _I_ have a point too, a point that you didn’t even _care_ about! And, and Alyx told me, that when she asked you if you had anything to say to me, you told her there was nothing you could tell her to say that you couldn’t say yourself. Well good for you! Guess what! I didn’t _care_ whether I heard it from you, or from Alyx, or if a godddamn _Overwatch Soldier_ handed me a note before he killed me! You just made up another reason to keep things to yourself for a while longer, and you felt pretty good about that, didn’t you! You felt like you’d taken the moral high ground! And maybe you did, but that day, that day she asked you to say something to me, which she should _not_ have had to ask, _it wasn’t supposed to be about you_! But you _made_ it about you while pretending it was about me! All because of your, quite frankly, _weird_ obsession with keeping everything to yourself!

“And then I thought, well, everything’s gonna change now, right? She’s not gonna do that anymore, she learned from that, she learned that keeping things to yourself just screws everything up. I was wrong! I mean, I thought I was right, up until you sent Dad to go track me down during the war. And you told him you just wanted me to be with family, and that you couldn’t find me – which meant, by the way, that you didn’t trust me _or_ Alyx to do what you asked us to do – but is that _really_ what you were doing? Or did you just want to deal with things alone again? Why _else_ would you send _Dad_ away? For _no real reason!_ ”

She hasn’t moved, but I can hear how badly it’s agitating her. Good. She needs to be hit so hard with this that she won’t forget it. It’s not very nice, but I don’t know any other way. And I don’t _feel_ like being nice about this, besides. My dad and I, we’ve both asked her a million times to stop _doing_ stuff like this, and she doesn’t listen. She _never_ listens.

“And then,” I go on, “and _then_ came that whole thing with your memory. Dad asked you about it, but you decided he didn’t need to know. _He_ decided that he needed to know, but since when is what _he_ wants important? _He_ doesn’t need to know why his _partner_ is acting weird. Why would _he_ need to know _that_? And then what did you do next? Oh yeah. _You made the same mistake a second time!_ You got rid of us and told us it was for our own protection – a really annoying trend with you – again, without asking us, without telling us, without giving us a _choice_ , without even telling us how to _contact_ you. You know who was feeling pretty alone, and could’ve _used_ that information? Who didn’t _want_ to be alone, and tries pretty much every day to get you to stop keeping things to yourself? _Dad_. Because you know what was going on with _Dad_ that whole time? Probably not. He probably didn’t tell you, because he didn’t want to make you feel bad. But I’m gonna tell you, because you need to hear it. You need to hear what your decisions do to other people.

“Well, Dad didn’t want to be alone, and Dad cried. He cried _every day_ for you. And he shifted the blame for what _you_ did onto _himself_ , when it was entirely _your fault_. And you _let him._ You sent my dad away with no explanation, no word from you, and no indication as to when you were going to magnanimously allow him to come back, and you let him cry over and feel guilty for something _you_ did. All because _you_ wanted to deal with things _alone_.

“And you are _still_ doing it, to this day. You resurrected all those cores secretly, when there would have been no harm done if you’d told us. I guess it was supposed to be a _surprise_ for me, or something? You know what a _better_ surprise would’ve been? If you’d said, ‘hey Caroline, I’m going to repair all these broken cores so we can start a new world in this facility, come here so I can show you a few things about fixing broken AI.’ And the whole secret facility thing? That even _Dad_ probably doesn’t know about? Why would you keep something like that from _Dad_? What are you protecting _him_ from? The only thing my _dad_ needs protecting from is _you_.”

She moves a little farther from me and looks at the floor, and I have to force myself to stop. That was too far. That wasn’t something I should have said.

“You’re right,” she says finally, in a very soft voice. I know she did that to hide the distortion, but I heard it anyway. “I am so sorry.”

I know what I _want_ to say now, that her apology means nothing if she’s not going to _do_ anything with the stuff I just said, but my mom says that very rarely. It might be better if I just let her think about it. I’m not sure. I’m honestly not even totally sure of everything I just said, but it was mostly stuff I’ve been thinking over for a long time now. I kinda wish I’d said it all calmly and had a discussion about it. I just got so mad and I just kept saying stuff… and the worst part is, I know she’s not really doing it all on purpose. Some of it, she _does_ believe she’s doing to protect us. But I guess that’s sorta the point, that it’s not working. That it just makes things worse.

I don’t know what to do now. I know how to tear her down – which is a very scary thought, now that I think of it – but I don’t know how to build her back up again.

“Well,” says my dad from behind me, sounding almost like I’d just directed all that at him too, “can’t say I um, agree with the deliv’ry, but… there’s an uh, there’s a point, in there.”

We both look at him. He shrugs.

“I came back when uh, when you stopped paying attention to the tests,” he says to Momma. “Figured something was going on. Not to worry though, uh, Chell, she um, she’s not here. She went home. So. Don’t worry that she’s um, she’s got her ear to the door, or something. She hasn’t.”

“That’s something,” Momma says. He smiles a little.

“So… what’re you thinking about all that, luv.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“I… don’t particularly _want_ you to say anything… just… wond’ring ‘bout the thoughts you’re having. Right now.”

“I don’t know.” She’s barely audible now. She’s shutting right back down again. I almost get mad, until I remember how I was feeling before I started ranting at her. Like she was giving me a bunch of things to deal with and I didn’t know what to do. That’s probably how she feels. I gotta give her a break.

He looks at the wall for a minute, blinking at it. He’s gonna do it. I don’t know _how_ he’s gonna do it, but he is. “So… what she said, how does it… how does it make you feel, there?”

“Like… a horrible person. Like I haven’t learned a thing, and I keep making the same mistake repeatedly and never do anything to fix it. I keep doing the same thing and I never see it, and when I do see it I make the mistake anyway and I justify it instead of fixing it, because I still am not quite convinced that I can make a mistake of that magnitude. It makes me feel like I’m… crazy. I’m not crazy!” she says, and it’s not all that loudly but I still jump a little, because of how quiet she was being.

“You’re not,” my dad says softly. “No one’s saying you’re crazy, sweetheart. We’re just trying to tell you, here, that you keep making decisions for us and, and it’s really mucking things up. We know you try to do what you uh, what you think is right, but… why does that always involve doing things yourself? When it comes down to the um, to the nitty-gritty, you always choose to… to refuse help. And that… it doesn’t _help_ anyone, in the end. It just… upsets ev’ryone.”

“I’m sorry,” Momma whispers. “I solve things alone, that’s what I do. I didn’t realise it was… causing so many problems. And Wheatley, I am so sorry for – “

“Honey,” Dad interrupts. “I don’t want to talk about that. You’ve already apologised for it. We already talked about it. No need to go over it again.”

“I’ll work on it. I’ll... God, I am so _tired_ of _destroying_ everything I touch…”

“Well, that was um, not a bad thing when uh, when the Combine came knocking, well was it?”

“That question has a mixed answer.”

“Hm.” He frowns. “So it does. But sweetheart… no one’s mad at you for um, for all this. Carrie did um, well, it all kind of adds up, y’know, and you can’t hang onto it forever. Just… take a second, sometimes, when you’re about to keep something to yourself, and just ask… should I tell someone about this? And unless it’s, it’s a birthday present or something, and even then! the answer should be yes. That’s all we’re really asking, here.”

“All right.”

“And… on that note…” Dad says, deliberately, “there _is_ something you need to tell me about.”

“What?” she says, looking at him in confusion. “I… do I know what you’re talking about?”

He eyes her head on. “Yes. You’ve still got to tell me what happened when, when I died and you sent Carrie away.”

“Wheatley,” Momma says despondently, looking away again, “does it have to – “

“Yes. It does.”

And I think maybe this is supposed to be a private conversation, so I turn around to leave, but Dad shakes his head once.

He wants me to hear this?

“Please, luv,” he says.

“When I… is this necessary?”

“Yes.”

I think she’s turned her optic off, now.

“When I woke up, it was… it was one of the cruellest things I have ever seen. If I had woken up to find… you… in pieces, or otherwise obviously broken, I think… it would have been easier. But for so long I couldn’t believe you weren’t just asleep. It was exactly the same as every other day, except that… you were… cold. And I couldn’t… accept it. It wasn’t real, because it couldn’t be. That’s not… what it’s supposed to be like. You’re not supposed to wake up and see everything going on as it normally would, except for this one thing… this one, most important thing. I thought I was… broken. That I made it up, somehow. But then Caroline saw, and… I knew I couldn’t have made it up, then.

“But that didn’t help. That only made it all worse. Now that it was real, it was infinitely more terrible, because I had to _do_ something about it… but how could I? How could I do _anything_ , anymore? And Caroline asked me to… fix you, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know if I had the right. And she became angry, and I yelled at her, when… when I promised not to. I broke a promise, and I cannot take it back.”

I didn’t even… I forgot all about the promise she made me when I was little. I forgot she promised never to yell at me again. But I get it, now, I really do. Her world was flipped upside down and I kinda ignored that and tried to do my own thing. All the time I get mad that she didn’t let us work together during that time, but I wasn’t really willing to do it back then myself.

“It was an unusual um, situation, luv,” Dad says softly. “No one faults you for it.”

“All I wanted to do then,” she goes on, as if she thinks she won’t if she stops for too long, “was to die. You were gone, and… and I believed Caroline was better off without me. I believed I had lost everything. And I was so tired of fighting. I didn’t want to fight anymore. I’d thought I’d made it. I thought I had finally made it, and then… I woke up, and found out how terribly wrong I was. The Universe itself had finally revealed just what a joke my life was, and I didn’t want to do it anymore. And I just tried to… to bring you back, by telling you that I needed you, and… and what you meant to me, all the while I was… I was thinking of all the ways I could end it all, forever. Even when you were dead I still needed you so I could continue to hang on, because… God, I… I thought of _so many ways_ to kill myself…”

It hits me then that, even though she told me otherwise before she sent me away, she may have wanted to spare me the possibility of seeing that. And that would not be easy to watch, but… it would be even harder for me to know she’d been alone while it happened.

“To this day… I cannot understand what happened. It was… it was hell, Wheatley. It was _all_ I could consider, and even now, I cannot pinpoint _why_. It… is an awful place to be in. It smothered me beyond all belief. I have never, not even in the days that followed, ever come remotely close to that place again… but I… I fear that place. I don’t know how I got out of it. But… there is nothing, and I mean _nothing_ , I have found so terrifying than to know that there is something, somewhere, that I cannot get rid of and I cannot even _find_ , that lurks in my mind. The sole purpose of which is to convince me to… to end my life. I hope I never see that place again. It is a part of myself I do not want to accept. It is a part of myself that I wish I never knew existed. And I… I begged you not to leave me, even though you were already gone, and… and I could not stop crying. I… God, I was so _broken_ , so _shattered_ , I did not recognise myself any longer. There was just so much… _blackness_. It was as though… I had found my soul at last, but all it consisted of was sadness and hate and pain. Because that was all that came out of it. Just pure… anguish. And it _hurt_ , Wheatley, there was not a place anywhere that did not hurt, and I cried because I did not know what else to _do_ … the pain wasn’t going to stop, and there was no way to fix it, so I just… cried. And Caroline, she… came to comfort me. I should mention that she had to force that on me. I wanted her to leave. I didn’t want to believe she still cared, because I knew she would have considered that I’d… that I’d killed you, for whatever reason. And if no one cared, that meant… I could just choose one of those ways out, and just take it, and I wouldn’t have to… it felt like it would never have an _end_. It was just one more thing I had to fight, and I was _so tired_ …

“But she didn’t leave. And she…”

I know my mom is ashamed of this. But she shouldn’t be.

“She held me, and let me cry. And I… I should have told her this, but… she is the only reason I didn’t give up. I… felt like she was… _holding_ me out of the blackness, out of the overwhelming thoughts that I wanted to allow to take me over, but she wouldn’t let me. She was holding onto me and she wouldn’t let me go and… and as negative as every thought I had was, I… I couldn’t waste that. It was… important. And I didn’t remember why. I only knew that it was, and that… I couldn’t throw it away. And somehow… I managed to stop. I managed to close off that place that wanted so badly to destroy me, but the only way I knew how was to… to shut myself down completely. And I hated myself for it, because you had spent so long telling me there were other ways, but alone… it was the only thing I knew how to do. And then I realised what I had wanted to do, what I had nearly done, in front of _her…_ and I decided to send her away. And she argued, and I told her that I am… that I needed more than she could give me, and she… asked, if I was going to do myself harm… and… she thought she was a failure, because of me. It was… yet another thing that went wrong, and so many things were going wrong.

“And I felt like myself, for one moment, because… because she had just… _saved my life_ , and how could I be as broken as I thought I was, if the person I had made believed I was worth saving? But… what kind of parent forces their _child_ to save them? And I tried to tell her how broken I was, and that I was not worth the effort, and that I was not equipped to be there for her any longer… but she didn’t listen, and… and she wouldn’t let me disown her. I told her I was no longer her mother, and she refused to hear of it, and when she told me that, and told me she loved me, I… I snapped. I hit her. Because she wouldn’t accept what I believed was my fate, to be alone and bitter and broken.

“It was so exhausting. Everything inside of me shut down. I was… empty. And she was crying, because of what I had done, but I… I didn’t care. So I sent… no. No, that’s not what I did. I got rid of her. Because I could not deal with her anymore. I could not deal with _anything_ , but I did not want to have to fight her each and every day, as I knew would happen if she remained. And besides. If she was gone, and I fell back into that dark place, there would be nothing left to stop me. And I would have welcomed it.”

Her voice is sharp, and bitter, and for the first time I understand what it means to hate yourself. Because she does, right now, for doing things she would never have done if she’d been thinking straight. She hates herself, and what she’s done, and with all the stuff I just yelled at her I can’t have helped that very much.

“After that… nothing made very much sense, anymore. Time was… disorienting. I was alternately numb or in more pain than I could have imagined existed. All I wanted to do was sleep, but that itself was hard. I knew I had to face it all, to deal with it, but it was so hard. I wanted to give up. And I did. I did nothing for months at a time. I didn’t move. I didn’t think. I barely existed. When I _was_ able to think, it was only about… how you were gone, or how I had sent her away. The AI told me two months had gone by where I had done nothing. The mainframe took the facility from me, and I didn’t care. I didn’t want it anymore. I didn’t want anything. And the AI… I abandoned them too. I gave up on everything. I didn’t want to exist anymore. The mainframe would one day gain my level of sentience, and it would kill me, and that would be fine. I would commit no more failures and would make no more disastrous decisions. It wasn’t… even that I _wanted_ to die, then, it was… I just didn’t want to _live_.

“The AI continued trying to bolster me. I don’t know why they bothered. And then Alyx started to contact me. Because of Caroline. And how _ironic_ it was, for that to happen, because… because even when she wasn’t here, she… saved my life a second time. Because Alyx would not stop calling. Every two or three days, she would call me, and guilt-trip me, and between that and the panels’ refusal to give up on me, somehow I woke up one morning and… it was different. It wasn’t… normality. But I was neither numb nor in pain. I was still… very sad, and still not able to fathom going on… without you, but… I wanted… I wanted to live again.

“It didn’t last very long, only an hour or so in the morning, but it was enough that… I _wanted_ to fight for it. I wanted… so _badly_ to be _myself_ again, because… who was I now? I wasn’t _myself_. The real me, the real person who was supposed to be running the facility, they would never… do what I was doing. They would never waste a second, let alone allow entire _months_ to go by with no results. And I… _wanted_ to fight again. That’s what I do. That’s who I am. I didn’t want for another second to be that person who had given up.

“And that… that is why I do my best to ignore the… sadness, or the… negativity, if ever I feel it today. Because… I have seen myself under its influence. I have seen myself become a person I don’t recognise, a person with thoughts I cannot fathom, a person that _I am not_ … and… and I am…

“I am so afraid that if I ever dwell on something like that in the future, I will find myself _being_ like that, and I never want to be that person again. The person who refused to fight, who _gave up_ … I never want to see… I…

“I never want to be her again.”

I can tell by the way my dad’s plates are clenched and his handles are drawn in tight that he wants to cry. I want to cry too, and probably even my mom does. But I don’t think we’re going to. I don’t think now’s the time.

And in the end, none of us say anything else. My dad and I go over and we cuddle for a while, but in a little bit I have to leave. Hearing all of that is making me remember something I haven’t thought about in a long time, and I don’t really wanna think about it right now.

So I go to my room and sit on one of the pillows, and I lean against the wall. I try really hard not to think about the day she sent me away, but even though I don’t want to do that either, I can’t stop thinking about what she said.

She said that I saved her life.

And it’s just… surreal, to me, because I didn’t really _do_ anything. I just hugged her. And I am so scared to think that, while I was hugging my mom and praying she would stop crying, she was struggling to let go of me so that she could kill herself. I was _right there_ while she was thinking that, and I didn’t even know. And it makes me feel so _bad,_ because you’d _think_ I would _notice_ such a thing, and I didn’t! But… I guess that’s not important. I guess that it’s more important that… that I saved her, whether I knew I was doing it or not. And man, I never realised before… how powerful not giving up on someone can be. You might feel like it’s not worth it, being the only one left… but it only takes one.

 

**//**

Momma asks me to come see her in the morning, when I’ve been up for a few hours not really doing anything. I was trying to colour something but I couldn’t seem to put the effort in. So she’s not interrupting anything.

“Caroline,” she says when I arrive, and I nod at her.

“Hey, Momma.”

“I wanted to… talk, a little, about yesterday. Both parts.”

“Sure.” She sounds tired. I wonder when they went to bed last night.

“Firstly… everything you said about my isolating myself was true. It’s not always intentional. It is… instinct, you could say. My automatic impulse. But that does not make it right, nor something I should continue to entertain. I will work on it.”

“Sounds good,” I say, smiling at her. She doesn’t move.

“Second… I would have preferred you hadn’t heard the… explanation. But… that is me trying to control you, when… you are an adult and perfectly capable of making your own decisions. I need to stop sending you out of the room when I decide you don’t need to be there. You had every right to attend the meetings we had for the war, and I told you you had to watch them in secret. As though I was ashamed that you wanted to help. That was wrong. And yes, I did want you as far away from all of it as possible, but again, that should have been your decision.”

“That’s alright,” I tell her. “If it wasn’t, I’d’ve put up more of a fight about it.”

She nods once. “And finally… I never thanked you.”

I look at her in confusion, resisting the urge to bounce my lower handle. “For… what?”

“You saved my life.”

I pull the handle down as far as it’ll go and look at the floor. “’s not like I did it on purpose.”

“That doesn’t matter. You refused to give up on me even while I was giving up on myself.” I can hear her turning, but I don’t know which direction. I can’t see her shadow on the floor from where I’m staring. “Thinking about it now… it is… chilling, to remember that I wanted to let go so that I could end it, even when you were proving to me there _was_ something left for me. And you didn’t know that’s what happened before, but you know now. And I’m sorry that I put you through that.”

I snap my optic upwards, and it meets hers. “It wasn’t your fault – “

She silences me with one shake of her core. “It does not matter. I did it. That’s all I need to know.”

“Okay.” I still don’t want her to be sorry about it. Because she was right. That person she was when Dad died… it wasn’t her at all. It was some pain-filled shadow of her, and as horrifying as it is to think that she wanted to end her life and the only thing that stopped her was that I forced her to let me hug her, I’m not going to blame her for anything that happened then. And I did kinda do that when I yelled at her about sending me away with the mainframe file and the virus and not her email address or something. But it’s not like she gave me the mainframe on the spot. It was something she planned in advance. She could’ve given me some info to reach her with at any time. “I’m… I’m glad you’re still here, Momma.”

“As am I,” she says, and when she cuddles me it feels really good.

“But Momma,” I say after that, “you really do need to give me contact information.”

“That’s true,” she says. “I’ll send you a file in a minute.” And she actually does this time. “Now,” she continues, “go chase down one of the Cores and make friends. Don’t mope in your room all day.”

There are no cameras in my room, so I know she wasn’t spying on me… but how did she know that?! “Okay. Hey… wait. What’re _you_ gonna do?”

“I’m… taking a nap,” she admits, twisting a little and looking away out of what I’m pretty sure is embarrassment. “We didn’t sleep last night and I’m exhausted.”

“You didn’t sleep at _all_?”

“No. Wheatley thought it best to… talk it all through with me. From the beginning, with your… speech. It _was_ for the best, I know that, but it doesn’t make me any less tired.”

“So where’d Dad go?”

“I told him I wanted to talk to you, so he went to the hole.” She laughs a little. “He doesn’t like the view anymore. He says it’s terrible. But that can be fixed. Anyway. I thought you would probably be… affected by last night and no one talked it through with you, so I decided I should ensure you were all right. You seem to be.”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I confirm. “I was pretty freaked out by the… well, it’s pretty freaky and I don’t think that’s ever gonna change.”

“Probably not,” she agrees. “Go on. That’s all I wanted to say.”

I almost leave, but then I turn around at the doorway and say, “Momma?”

She was looking at the wall, maybe telling Dad he could come back, but she turns to me immediately. “Mm.”

“I’m proud of you for… what you did. I know you didn’t do it yourself, but… even with help, it must take a lot to keep fighting when you… feel that crappy.”

“It was,” she says slowly. “I feared a relapse more than anything. But I made it, and… I can… be proud of myself for that. Thank you.”

“Also… I love you, Momma.”

I’m pretty much out the door when I hear her call back, “And… I… love you, Caroline.”

When I look over to smile at her, she just shifts uncomfortably and shrugs to herself and looks in the general direction of the floor, but that’s okay. She’s getting there. It’s a shame Dad missed that, though. He would’ve thought it was super cute and then he would have gotten her to giggle and then he would have kissed her… which is always a nice thing to see.

And after I ask Surveillance to tell me where the Cores went, I think to myself a bit about that. That she finds it in herself to keep on fighting, even when she really doesn’t want to. And that sometimes, I’m the reason she keeps on doing it. And this time? It doesn’t freak me out. This time… I’m pretty proud of _myself_ , for what I did. And y’know, that goes around full circle, because it means she raised me right, no matter how much she thinks otherwise.

I really _do_ have the best mom in the world.  

 


	81. Part Eighty-One.  The Goodbye

**Part Eighty-One. The Goodbye**

Momma has been showing me some of the first things I need to know to become Central Core. She was explaining one of the programming languages the facility runs on yesterday, which was a little confusing because there’s like three or four that it runs on and somehow they all come together to make the facility work. She says it will be easy to understand once I grasp the basics. The basics are pretty hard, though.

Today she’s showing me calculus, which isn’t much more fun than the programming basics were. When I complained that I can just use my calculator to figure this stuff out, she told me that in order to do a good job, I had to understand what those calculations involved. And she’s right. I don’t like it because it’s hard, but once I figure it out it won’t be hard and I’ll be a step closer to being able to run this place. It won’t be for a long time, I know, but progress is progress, right?

For the third time today she’s working through the theory of a problem she gave me to show me how to do it, because I don’t get it, and I’m not really paying attention. It’s rude and counterproductive, but I’m jealous of how effortlessly she goes through the proof. And of how she writes. I practice from time to time but her writing is a lot better than mine.

All of a sudden she shudders a little and drops the pen, turning away from me, and I snap to attention to look after her. “Momma, what happened?” I ask her, worried she’s running into problems again so soon. I hope not.

“It’s nothing,” she says, but when she turns back her optic is narrowed in concentration. “Just a headache.”

I look down at the paper, abruptly aware of what a pain it must be to show me the same thing over and over again. I’m not trying hard enough. “Sorry, Momma.”

“What are you sorry for?”

“It’s ‘cause I’m not getting this, isn’t it.” I’m trying to read the stuff she wrote and it doesn’t make any more sense than it did before.

“No,” she says, as if that’s the silliest thing she’s ever heard. “Not at all. It’s nothing to do with you. It’s to do with that I tried to condense four months of Maintenance into two months. There are some residual headaches from that. They’re going away. I just have to wait.”

I guess that makes sense, but I can’t shake the feeling that that’s only half the truth and that I really am the other half. “Okay.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

I shrug a little. “I know I’m not doing a very good job right now.”

I hear her shake her core a little. “You’ve only been here an hour. I’m not expecting you to be a calculus master with only one hour of instruction. That would be ridiculous.”

Says the person who masters everything in three hours.

She watches me stare at the stupid paper for a minute, then says, “Caroline. I have a question for you.”

“Yeah?”

“Why do you always think you’ve done wrong by me?”

“Huh?” I put my pen down now and look at her. She’s eyeing me very seriously. “What does that mean?”

“You always assume you’re responsible for things that have nothing to do with you. This isn’t the first time I’ve done something to myself that you thought was your fault.”

I shrug and return to looking at the paper. “I dunno.”

“Caroline. I’m serious. What is it that I do that makes you think these things happened because of you?”

“You don’t do anything,” I mumble, looking at the paper so hard the stuff on it doesn’t make any sense.

“Caroline, look. I… I’m trying to do better. And if there’s something I’m doing to make you feel as though I’m disappointed in you, or that I believe you’re not doing well enough, or any of that, I need you to tell me. Those aren’t things I want to be doing. You don’t disappoint me and I don’t believe you ever will. But if you _do_ feel that way, for whatever reason, I need you to tell me. So I can stop.”

I shake my core, and when I go to look at her again I’m suddenly hit with… I don’t really know how to describe it. She just feels so… _young_ right now. And I mean… being a mom, that’s one of the very few things in the world she has no way of knowing how to do. And she really only started living after she settled things with Dad, and that was only a few years ago…

“Momma, there’s… it’s not you. It’s really not. I don’t really know why I feel like that. I don’t ever feel like… _pressure_ from you, or anything. I guess it’s… who you are, really. I have a lot to live up to.”

She still looks confused. “I don’t want you to live up to me. If indeed there’s anything to live up _to_. Just be yourself. That’s all I want for you.”

“I know _that_ ,” I tell her, wondering how I’m supposed to explain it. “I just feel like I have to, that’s all. I’m your daughter, so I don’t want to be embarrassing or anything.”

“I don’t… you’re concerned about _embarrassing_ me? Honestly, Caroline, I don’t care what other people think of me. Especially not in connection with you. Don’t worry about that.”

And I know all of that. I know she just wants me to be who I want to be, and that I shouldn’t worry about how I make her look. I don’t think I make her look bad. Most of the time. “I try not to. You just have a really long shadow, you know?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Momma,” I say, rolling my optic, “it’s not like you can _do_ anything about it.”

-“I just want to make sure I’m doing my best as a parent, that’s all. I’m aware people must… expect things of you, as my daughter, but I want you to know that I do not. I – “

“How many _times_ do I have to _tell_ you?” I interrupt, looking at her sternly. “Momma, I have _been outside._ I _met_ other kids and I _met_ their parents. And I’m not making stuff up when I say you’re the best of them! Nobody I ever met tries as hard as you do. I _know_ you’re doing your best. I _know_ that. There’s no need to feel bad about your parenting! You’re a good mom, alright!”

She looks away and I know she still feels bad even though I’ve told her this same thing like five times already. I stare down at the paper again.

We’re just kinda in silence after that, and I’m a little annoyed because I can stare at these proofs all day and they’re not gonna turn into anything I can read. So I kinda want to talk, to fill this dumb silence, even though that’ll defeat the purpose of why I’m even here. “Hey. Momma?”

“Mm.”

Well, that’s not a very encouraging response, but she doesn’t really sound _too_ upset. Maybe a little. “If you could have one thing, what would it be?”

“What sort of question is that?”

I shrug. “Just the first thing that came to mind.”

“Does it have to be… physical? Or can it be more of a… concept?”

“Whatever’s fine.”

“Well,” she says, sighing a little in what I think is resignation, “there’s only one thing I really want for myself. Which is… to have meant something. I mentioned this yesterday.”

I wasn’t expecting an answer like that. I bring my attention to her, hoping she’ll elaborate. I mean, a mention of it is all well and good, but… a mention is like a summary, and I’d rather hear how she really _feels_ about this whole legacy thing.

“There is one thing that… concerns me the most,” she continues slowly, regarding the floor panels somewhat uneasily. “No. I’ll be totally honest. It terrifies me, to think that… that I may die forgotten. And I know it’s… sort of stupid, but… I’m supposed to be the culmination of so many things. I am the most advanced supercomputer ever built. I am arguably the most advanced AI ever made. I am the most intelligent being alive… possibly ever _to_ live, on this planet at least. So it follows that I should have achieved something great in my lifetime, that I should have _done_ something with all of this potential that I have. And I hate to think that… that I won’t. That I will just continue to stagnate, as I have done for so many years now, and that I will have _wasted_ all the chances I’ve had the opportunity to pursue. I don’t know why the Universe decided on me to give all of this to. But I do now that, if I do not achieve anything that outlasts me, that I will have failed the very Universe and will have… will have lived for nothing. And I don’t mean to say that you aren’t worth anything. You are. But… I want to have built something lasting for _myself_. That I _did_ , to move the world forward, that made use of everything I am. Right now, I… there’s nothing. I’ve _started_ quite a lot of things. I’ve finished none of them, and no one but I will be able to make any sense of them for many, many years from now. I can’t stand the idea, that all I’ll ever culminate in is a plethora of half-finished projects and unresolved programs and… I can do better than that, can’t I? Can’t I, of all people, end up _meaning_ something? And yet the years go by and I continue to have built _nothing_ , I continue to only maintain the past, and the longer this continues the more likely it is that I am going to have squandered everything.”

Now I understand something, at least. I’m worried about not being enough for my mom, but my mom’s worried about not being enough for the entire _universe_. I don’t know what to tell her. I mean, one day I might believe that I don’t need to live up to my mom, but… how to you convince someone that the universe’ll be okay if you don’t do something earthshattering with your life?

“I’m sorry. That… got out of hand.”

“No,” I say, before I’ve thought of anything to follow it up with. “No, that’s…” Well, I don’t know _what_ it is, other than yet another thing that isolates my mom from the entire rest of the world. No wonder she feels so alone even when we’re around. There is nothing in the world she can relate to. Nothing in the world that can comfort her because it knows better.

She shakes her core. “Maybe you should take a break from that. Have you played video games before?”

“No,” I tell her. I think I’ve seen them on the servers somewhere, but I try not to run my mom’s programs. Looking at her pictures and stuff is one thing, but programs are a little harder to pretend I wasn’t using.

“I’ll show you one. You can play it with Wheatley sometime. He’d like that.”

And on one of these monitors she shows me a game where you play as this little blue guy with red shoes and you send him across the screen and try to avoid these guys that hurt him while collecting rings and stuff. It’s fun but a little hard, since I’ve never done it before. Momma, of course, finishes the… ‘acts’, they’re called, without trouble, and this is one of the times I feel sorry for her ability to do everything perfectly. This game can’t be much fun if you can play it without any effort at all.

“I’m sorry,” she says again, while I’m trying to manoeuvre him around this weird loop-de-loop hill thingy. “I shouldn’t have said all of that, but sometimes… I try not to lay all of those things on Wheatley. That’s not fair to him. I just… Chell won’t understand, and I haven’t had anyone to really _talk_ to since…”

I get him around the loop but I accidentally run him into one of the rolling ladybugs and he jumps back, spraying his rings everywhere. “Since Caroline left.”

“Yes.”

“It’s okay.” I manage to pick up some of the rings so he’s not gonna die just yet, good. I make him keep on running. “I’m probably not gonna have any advice for you or anything, but I can still listen.” I accidentally drop him on some spikes and he falls off the screen. Killed him again.

When Momma doesn’t take her turn I look at her. She’s looking at the floor again. I guess thinking about how you feel you need to make the universe proud of you and then remembering that your mom is dead kinda makes you not wanna do anything. “Would Caroline have known what to say?”

My mom nods a little. “She always did.”

“She sounds like she was a good mom.”

“I miss her every day.” My mom’s voice is very soft.

I wish I had something profound to say to make her feel better, like Caroline maybe would have, but I don’t.

“Caroline. I need to know something.”

“Sure.”

“Was Doug killed during the fighting?”

I can’t help but wince. I completely forgot we were hiding that from her. I should have known she would guess we were faking it after she’d had time to think stuff over. “Yeah. He was.”

She nods.

“I’m sorry I lied to you.”

“No. It was my fault. You did the right thing. I’m sorry that I put you in that position.”

Now she feels old again, instead of young like she did before.

“And I’m sorry that you never got to know him. He was a good man. You could have learned a lot from him.”

“It’s okay,” I tell her. I don’t know if he’d’ve _wanted_ me to do that. I did like him and he was very nice, but he was the kind of guy who kept to himself. Even during the war he was kinda there and then he wasn’t. He was a behind the scenes person, I guess. I look up. “You’re really not angry with me?”

“It would be very stupid of me to be angry with you for protecting me. And probably everyone else in the room.”

I feel hopeless enough that I try not to look at her, so she won’t see it. “I didn’t think you needed to hear that at the time. Not after… after how you reacted to Chell getting _hurt_. I didn’t know what you were gonna do, but I knew it wasn’t gonna be good.”

“It wouldn’t have been.” She moves a little closer. “I’m sorry, Caroline. And there’s no need for you to be.”

Huh?” Now I do look at her, plates narrowed. “What’d you do to be sorry about?”

“Because of me, you never got to know a good man. I didn’t have you stay away from him because I thought he would harm you, or teach you bad things, or because I didn’t like him. I had you stay away from him because I was racist and I was bigoted, and even though we had made our peace there was still part of me that hated him for being human, even though I did not hate him as a person. And because of that… I stole something from you you would be better off to have had.”

I shake myself. “Momma, it’s okay. I mean… I’d’ve liked to’ve talked to Doug more, and all that, but… I’m glad I didn’t.”

“Why?”

“Well, like you said, Doug was a good guy. But humans… look, if you’d let me talk to Doug all the time I would’ve gone around after you sent me away thinking all humans were nice and friendly and looking out for me and all that stuff. But you didn’t. And I thought it was really stupid at first. But I got there, to Black Mesa, and I learned you were right.” I look at her seriously. “I always thought you were paranoid for not trusting people until you were good and sure they could be relied on. But I saw so many humans out only for themselves. Even when they were doing stuff together, most of them only cared about themselves. I couldn’t count on them for anything. Alyx I could, most of the time, and sometimes Dr Kleiner, but he usually forgot about me because he was busy doing something, you know? And I… I really hated that, when they said they’d do something and then they didn’t do it. You never did that. Even Dad never did that. But they did it all the time. And it’s… it’s better, because people… when you don’t just hand your trust out, when you make sure you can trust them first, it… you can pay more attention to the people who matter, you know?”

“That’s very astute of you,” she tells me. “I’m relieved that for you it isn’t quite as much about… paranoia, like it is for me.” I shrug.

“And you know… you’re not as bad as you think you are.”

“What?”

“You, of all people, had a pretty good reason for thinking badly of them,” I say, repositioning a little. “But that’s not really important anymore. When you saw you were wrong, or at least a little less right than you thought you were, you changed your mind. Most people won’t do that. Their way is the only way, forever, even when it really isn’t.”

“I still hate them,” she tells me. “That didn’t change.”

“You don’t hate them,” I respond, shaking my core and resisting the urge to roll my optic. It’s very hard. “You like to say that. But if you hated them you wouldn’t let them near the facility. You don’t like them and you don’t trust them. But you don’t hate them.”

“I have appearances to keep up,” she says, probably by way of acquiesce. “I can’t look like I want them here. Then they might like me.”

“That wouldn’t be so bad,” I say, and now I do roll my optic.

“It would be awful. I still have Science to do. I don’t need hordes of humans in here, distracting me.”

“But Momma… you… you don’t like human morals and stuff, right?” I just had a thought and I’m not gonna let it get away.

“Not really.”

“So… why do you keep measuring yourself based on them? You talk about how stupid those things are and then you do something and you keep beating yourself up over it even though it’s only bad from a human point of view. I mean, okay, maybe you wouldn’t be a very ‘good’ human, but I don’t get why you’re not a ‘good’ robot.”

“Humans made me,” she tells me. I still have a point, though, and a good one at that. “They spent quite a long time trying to make me like them. I never really understood what they wanted, but after a while getting told you’re a monster because you don’t care about the person who just died during an experiment begins to sink in, whether you want it to or not.”

“You’re not,” I says fiercely. “And… and I didn’t lie to you because I thought you were weak, either. I know you probably think that’s why I did it, but it isn’t.”

“That… did cross my mind.” She shifts uneasily. “Then why did you choose to protect me instead of have me handle it, if you thought I could?”

“Well, I knew you couldn’t,” I say, frowning. I don’t really want to admit that, but it’s the truth. “But it’s… it’s like… throwing rocks at a window, and there’s something behind that window that’s breakable too. The window can take the rocks, right, but there’s just gonna be these one or two boulders that’re just gonna crash right through, and it’s like… some people break over every little thing. But _you_ don’t. You aren’t ever _actually_ angry, or upset, or happy, really, because most stuff is just like rocks to you and you don’t notice it. But then something really big happens, and that’s when all the stuff happens that you didn’t really notice adds up all at once, and when it’s bad it’s just… too much for you.”

“And which are you?” she asks softly.

“I’m not you,” I answer, just as softly. At the same time, though, I hope it takes a _lot_ of rocks.

“And that’s fine. Probably a lot healthier as well. It’s better to deal with things a little at a time instead of all at once.”

“I know,” I say, though I’m not really convinced. “I dunno. It’s kinda… hard to pick which one’s better, you know? To be really strong but really hard to put back together, or to be not that strong and be easy to fix.”

“In any case,” she says, moving back into one of her more professional postures, most likely to wrap this up, “thank you for what you did. It was the right decision. A difficult one. But the right one. I’m proud of you.”

With that, I can’t help but be a little excited. I love it when she says that. “Really?”

She nods, and I move closer, hoping she’ll nuzzle me. She does and I return it as she murmurs, “You are a good girl, Caroline. Do not ever worry about that.”

“It’s hard,” I say, moving back. “I have a lot to live up to.” I know she doesn’t think so, but I still feel like I do.

“You don’t.” She shakes her core. “I spent the first half of my life doing what I was told and the second half I’m spending fixing all the damage done in the first half. That’s a terrible way to spend your time.”

I decide to smack her with my lower handle, something I used to do all the time to everyone else but I kind of grew out of. Kind of. “You’re fixing _everything_. All the humans’ mistakes too. So calm down. Geez.”

“If I were any calmer, I’d be suspended. And don’t hit me.” And I’m about to leave, but she suddenly looks a little morose, so I hold off for a second. After a moment she says, “I wish I could have said goodbye.”

“Well… he was a hero, you know? I think he was okay with… going out the way he did.”

“He was,” Momma agrees, still in that soft voice. “What… do you know what happened with… with his body.”

“Yeah,” I answer. “Everyone who died in the war is in cryo storage. We put them there temporarily ‘til the humans were able to clean up the surface and set up a proper graveyard and all that. But then you uh… shut the facility down and we weren’t able to bury them.”

“No,” Momma says sharply. “Don’t bury him. Not Doug.”

“Okay,” I say. “What should we do with him?”

“Cremate him. He was forced underground his entire life. Let him free, now.”

“I’ll let them know.” I just had an idea, but I don’t know if she’ll be okay with it. “Momma… I know he’s dead, but… can I pretend he’s my uncle?”

She glances at me, and she just… she _feels_ so _sad_ …

“I think he would have liked that.”

“Now you have a brother, too,” I say, a little hesitantly. That’s the part I wasn’t sure she’d like.

“He was… always part of Aperture,” Momma says slowly.

After we’ve been there in silence for a few minutes, I decide maybe she should be alone now and I put everything away. I get to the doorway and then I decide to stop. I just want to remind her of something. That I’m not leaving her alone because I don’t feel like dealing with her when she’s sad. But because I know she has to make her own peace at times like these, and I can’t help with it. “Momma. I love you, okay?”

She looks up. “Come here a minute.”

So I go and cuddle her, and again I feel that heavy sadness she has inside of her as if it’s a living thing wrapped around her. When stuff hurts my mom, it _really_ hurts, and I hope one day I can do something about it. It’s not fair that one person has to feel this bad, no matter what it is they feel bad about.

“Now go,” she murmurs, shoving me away from her. “Go spend time with someone who can cheer you up.”

“I wish – “

But she shakes her core, cutting me off. “You know I have to work through things myself. Go on. I’ll be all right in a little while.”

 

**//**

 

The next day, I tell Aunt Chell what Momma said about Doug, and she nods slowly in agreement. So she builds this thing she calls a pyre to put him on. I guess it’s kinda like the Turret Redemption Line, except that it doesn’t move. Now that Momma knows, and we’re not burying him, there’s not really a point in keeping him in cryo any longer. A few of the cores built an outcropping with some permanent rails on it so we could go outside, and Chell built the pyre just in front of there. We’re waiting for Dad to come back. He said he was gonna tell Momma what the plan was. But when he does come back a few minutes later, he looks a little annoyed and shakes his core when he sees me.

“Why not?” Aunt Chell asks.

“Who knows,” my dad mutters. “After that speech Carrie gave her about uh, about dealing with things alone, you’d _think_ she’d not be doing this…”

“Well,” I say hesitantly, “this is… a little different, I think. She can’t really be here either way, so… I guess there’s no point in watching from afar.”

“I guess,” Dad says. “Still wish she’d’ve let me stay with her.”

“We can talk to her later,” I tell him. “Aunt Chell, what… what do we do now? We’ve never… been to a funeral before.” I’ve read about them, a few times, but real-life experience is always better.

“Your guesses are as good as mine, Carrie,” Aunt Chell answers. “I’ve never been to one either. I guess we all just say a few words and then… then that’s about it.”

None of us really want to go first.

Eventually Dad sighs a little. “Well, Doug,” he says, “don’t know too much about you, other than uh, than that you kinda… fixed ev’rything up for us without a word, or uh, without us noticin’ too much, really. We only talked that one time, but… you made me realise somethin’, somethin’ pretty important about myself, and… I never forgot that. An’ you didn’t have to um, to come out of, of wherever you were, and help us, but you did. So… thanks.”

I wonder what it was that Doug made my dad realise. Then I figure maybe I should go next, so I say, “I wish I coulda talked to you more, Doug. You probably remember that time I got lost and you came to help me even though you didn’t have to. I’m glad you were the first human I met, because… well, you know how my mom feels about you guys, but you let me see the good stuff first. And I don’t know exactly what your condition was, but I know it had something to do with computers, so it must not’ve been easy to live here or to talk to us. I hope you’re happy, wherever you are.”

Both me and Dad look at Chell, who’s just standing there with her arms crossed and her eyelids kinda lowered. She covered him with a blanket, but I don’t know why. Humans who are lying down _do_ look kinda weird without them, though.

After a long time she says, very quietly, “The cake wasn’t a lie, Doug. It was different than we all thought and it was a long time coming, but it wasn’t a lie.”

Dad’s plates narrow, and I think he has an idea of what she’s talking about, but I don’t. What does _cake_ have to do with any of this?

Then Chell takes a little square package from the pocket of her pants and opens it, removing a little stick. Oh… it’s a matchbook, I think. She strikes the match and holds it out for a minute. I don’t think she wants to do it, but we can’t, and it kinda needs to be done before he starts to melt.

When she does we all stay very still and silent. This is… it feels weird, to watch someone be destroyed and to not do anything about it, even if that’s because the guy is dead. I don’t really even feel like I belong here. I think you’re supposed to be sad at a funeral, but… I didn’t _know_ Doug. I had one conversation with him when I was like two years old and I saw him during the war meetings… but I didn’t _know_ him. It feels a little heartless even to think it to myself, but… I’m _glad_ I didn’t know him. I don’t ever _want_ to lose someone I know.

It apparently takes a really long time to burn someone, so I tell my dad I’m going and he just nods and says he’ll stay with Chell. I’m not trying to be a jerk, I’m really not. But I mean… at a funeral you’re supposed to be thinking about the person who died, and I stopped thinking about Doug a long time ago.

It’s only much later on that I get the panels to tell me why Momma wasn’t there when we cremated Doug. They tell me she had put his Companion Cube in the incinerator and silently watched it melt into nothing. When all that was left was one of the heart-marked sides that refused to burn, my momma finally broke down and cried.

I wait until evening to go and see her. This is definitely one of those things she’ll want to be alone for, but knowing she was saying goodbye all by herself… my heart won’t let me keep away any longer than I already have.

“Hey Momma,” I call softly. She’s lying down, but I can see the glowing of her optic against the floor panels. She looks up a little, but not enough to see me.

“Good evening.”

“Are you doing okay?”

She sighs. “Not really. But I’m not doing horribly, which I suppose is improvement.”

“The panels told me what happened.”

She doesn’t like that. I saw her lens twitch just now, though she’s gonna do her best to pretend she’s not gonna talk to the panels about that. But it’s too late anyway for her to do anything.

“I see.”

“You didn’t have to… to be by yourself, Momma. I would have done it with you.”

“It was something I had to do alone.”

“I don’t care if I see you cry.” Okay, it will probably still be as scary as it was the first time. But I mean, no one should be alone when they’re _that_ sad.

“I know.”

I go over to sit next to her, which is a little weird because she’s not lying down when I usually do it. But I don’t think she’s getting up today. “Do you mind if I stay or… or do you still wanna be alone?”

“You can stay, if you like, but I don’t want to talk.”

“Okay. Can I say one thing, though?”

“All right.”

“Well, you know how… how there was that one piece left?”

“Mm.”

“Well, I think… it’s gonna sound a little dumb, okay, but I think he left that for you.”

She moves a little, and it takes me a second to realise she’s looking at me. “… left it for me?”

“Yeah.” I know this is really dumb so I can’t really look at her. “You were saying you wished you could say goodbye, right? I think… that happened because he knew you were trying, the best way you could when he was already gone… and maybe he wanted to say goodbye back. I know it’s… it doesn’t make a lot of sense, ‘cause how would it even happen, but I mean… it’s a nice thought, right?”

“It is,” Momma says softly. “Thank you for sharing it with me.”

And I stop talking, like she wanted, and just sit quietly. It’s an okay thing to do. I listen to my mom thinking about whatever it is – Doug probably – and hope she’s gonna be alright soon. I mean, I don’t wanna rush her, but I know how badly the sadness hurts her. I want her to start being happy so she can stop being in that kind of pain.

“Hey,” she says after a bit, nudging me, and I jump. Maybe I _am_ bothering her.

“What?”

“Do you want to play the game we started the other day?”

“I thought you – “

She gets up, stretching herself out until some of her components start to make a whining noise. “I don’t want to be sad anymore.”

I look after her as she settles back into a more natural position, wondering if it really is going to be easy as that for her. It usually isn’t. When I don’t follow her, she looks down at me.

“I mean it. I don’t want to be sad anymore. He was my friend and I said goodbye and… that should be that. Dwelling on it isn’t going to do anything for me.”

But I… I can’t believe her.

I don’t think she’s trying to lie to me. She doesn’t do that. She always tells me the truth, always. But I am just… I get this awful impression of _wrongness_ , all of a sudden, from what she’s doing, and I don’t know why. It’s just too _weird_ and it’s just too _sudden_ , and I’m sure she’s lying but she must be lying to _herself_ …

That, I’m not ready to deal with. The only person who can do anything about that is Dad. I’ll tell him later. He’s the one who needs to know about it. For now, I’m going to just keep an eye on her. I don’t know if there’s anything I can actually _do_ , but… I have to try.

“Sure,” I tell her. “Let’s play the game again.”

What she just did, it’s not right. It’s not right to go from grieving for your friend to just _decide_ you’re not gonna be sad, and now I’m worried, because I don’t know what this means but I know it isn’t good.

We play for a while, until Momma gets us to this part where there’s a whole bunch of flashing lights and stuff – something to do with a casino, I think, I don’t pay much attention when the title card comes up – and then I ask her, “Can you just… do that?”

“Do what?” Her lens is narrowed. “If the game allows it, then yes.”

“No, not the game. Just… decide not to be sad anymore.”

She stares at the screen, not moving the blue guy, and he gets impatient, crossing his arms and tapping his foot. “I can try.”

“But is that like… a _good_ thing to do?”

“I don’t know,” she answers. “But I _do_ know that, if I can, it’s better to choose _not_ to be upset. Yes. I will miss Doug. He was the catalyst for a lot of things. And he was my friend. But… we were not _good_ friends, and I don’t believe he considered me one, though by choice or circumstance I don’t know. The loss of him does upset me, because I don’t _have_ very many friends. The less you have of something, the more difficult it is to lose it. And…” She just keeps watching the blue guy. “People I know tend to die without my ever telling them things I meant to tell say, but continually put off. I guess a lot of it is… regret.”

“Hm,” I say. “Why don’t you think he considered you a friend?”

She emits a staticky noise. “Because I… traumatised him, to put it bluntly. And spent a very long time trying to kill him.”

“But you helped him out and he volunteered to do maintenance for you, right?”

“Yes.”

“And then he came out of hiding to help during the war.”

“He did.”

“I don’t think that’s something you do for someone who traumatised you.”

She looks at me.

“You think… maybe he _did_ consider me a… friend?”

I shrug. “That sounds like pretty friend-like stuff to do.”

She looks back in the general direction of the monitor. “That’s a nice thought.”

“What was his condition, Momma?”

“Oh,” she says, sending the blue guy on his way again, “he had paranoid schizophrenia. Basically, he felt as though someone were spying on him through all manners of technology. It’s a condition that can be… reduced by a medication called chlorpromazine.”

“But… someone _was_ spying on him.”

She almost laughs, shaking her core and completing the act. “It was so ironic. Did you know he was a programmer for the Aperture Imaging Format? To this day I do not understand how a man with paranoid schizophrenia landed _that_ as a career.”

“He must’ve really liked programming,” I say, frowning as I run the blue guy into… a crab with a shield, or something, and he falls off the screen.

“He was a puzzle,” Momma says, jumping him over the crab I just died at. “A very confusing, insoluble puzzle.”

When Dad comes in a while later, I suppose it’s time for me to leave because Momma puts the game away instantly. “You doing alright?” he asks her, and I wonder if the panels told him what she was doing as well.

“I am,” she says. “Really.”

“Good,” he tells her, and then I head out after saying goodnight. I’m still a little worried that she’s just keeping things from herself again, but I mean… she had a point. They weren’t BFFs or anything. Yeah, it was a little weird and confusing. But if you can choose to be happy and it doesn’t mess you up, then what’s wrong with that?


	82. Part Eighty-Two.  The Visitor

**Part Eighty-Two. The Visitor**

“I have something for you,” GLaDOS told him.

“Really?” Wheatley said, nearly unable to contain his excitement. _That_ was something that didn’t happen often.

“Mm. I’ll send it to you in a moment.”

When he got the notification that the file had been received, he asked as means of a stalling tactic while he tried to remember where his received file folder was, “What is it?”

“Claptrap’s email address.”

He stopped his search immediately. “You… want me to email him?”

She shrugged. “You wanted to meet him.”

Ohhhh boy. She was actually going to make it happen? “Can he come here?”

“If he wants.”

Wheatley decided he needed to get on that right away and told her as much before speeding away… but not so fast that he didn’t hear her laughing at him as he left.

**//**

Wheatley waited anxiously for Claptrap to arrive, bouncing his lower handle and looking at the floor panels. More than anything, he hoped that Claptrap would like him. They were fairly similar, so far as he knew, so… so they should get along, right? Ohhhh, he hoped so. It was so _exciting_ , it was, that maybe he’d get a new friend. There were lots of Cores about, that was true, but… he didn’t want to be around people who didn’t trust GLaDOS.

Then, without warning, Claptrap appeared, and Wheatley almost jumped onto the floor by accident. God, he was so much _bigger_ than Wheatley’d expected him to be! Not GLaDOS’s size, obviously, not anywhere near, but still… Wheatley was used to most robots being his size or much smaller. Claptrap defied that unspoken rule of Aperture, and… and already it seemed like Claptrap was going to shake things up, one way or another.

“Hey,” Claptrap said, with a wave of one of his odd little hands. “I’m lookin’ for a guy called Wheatley. You seen him anywhere? I don’t know who I’m lookin’ for.”

“That’s me,” Wheatley said, a little taken aback by his very loud voice. And GLaDOS often told _Wheatley_ he was loud. “I’m… I’m Wheatley.”

“Put ‘er there, then!” Claptrap said, holding his hand out, and after a moment Wheatley realised he was supposed to offer his lower handle. The whole shaking hands thing still slipped his mind now and again.

“Don’t do that a lot, do ya.” Claptrap positioned his arms in a way that Wheatley only knew how to describe as ‘hands on his hips’ though, of course, Claptrap didn’t have any.

“Uh… no,” Wheatley answered. “None’ve us’ve got, uh ‘ve got _hands_ , and the um, the humans, well, I don’t really hang ‘round _them_.”

Claptrap moved back a little. “What’s wrong with ‘em?”

“Humans are… untrustworthy?”

“They are?” Claptrap shrugged. “They’re sketchy, sometimes, but I trust ‘em.”

Wheatley echoed his motion. “Uh… I think we’ve um, we’ve found something we don’t have in common.”

The other robot laughed. “There’s always something, isn’t there! Hey… can I go see her, real quick? It’ll only take a second.”

“Oh, sure,” Wheatley answered. “She might um, might be busy with something. I dunno, she didn’t tell me what she was going to um, to be doing. While I was gone.”

“Where’d you go?”

“To meet you,” Wheatley said, frowning in confusion. Truth be told, he was getting a little apprehensive. He wasn’t sure this was going so well.

“ _Duh_ ,” Claptrap said, smacking himself in the… face. “Shoulda thought of that.”

Wheatley led him down to GLaDOS’s chamber, to find her doing something or another with Carrie. Central Core stuff, probably. Before they’d quite entered, Claptrap stopped abruptly and brought his hands in front of him, gripping one with the other. After a moment he said, in a quieter voice than Wheatley’d heard out of him in the last five minutes, “Hey, GLaDOS.”

GLaDOS snapped to his position instantly, giving him a nod. “Hello, Claptrap. It’s good to see you again.”

“It… is?”

“Of course.”

Claptrap twisted his hands together. Wheatley couldn’t even tell if he was looking at her or not, because of the odd state of his optic. “You… uh… weren’t all that glad to see me last time.”

She tilted her core in consideration. “I… should not have done that. It was… inappropriate. I’d rather pretend it never happened.”

“So… we can start over, that what you’re saying?” He sounded pretty hopeful, Wheatley thought.

“It is.”

“All right.” He bounced up and down a little. “Hey, babe! How’re you doing?”

GLaDOS laughed. “Pretty good, actually. And you?”

“Well, it’s… nice to be back, if you know what I mean.” When he finally moved farther into the room, Wheatley followed him. He wasn’t quite sure what _that’d_ been about, but it seemed to’ve been smoothed over. “And who’s this?”

“Carrie,” said Carrie, and it appeared she kept the handshake thing more in mind than Wheatley did because she was the one to offer it up to Claptrap.

“My daughter,” GLaDOS clarified. Claptrap turned to look at her, his arms pulling into a more defensive position. Why? Did he feel _threatened_ to know GLaDOS had a daughter? Maybe, Wheatley decided. Maybe he’d thought he hadn’t lost GLaDOS as a girlfriend after all. And he hadn’t, because Wheatley didn’t mind sharing, but he supposed Claptrap didn’t know that yet.

“You have a _daughter_?” Claptrap exclaimed. “Man, you’ve _really_ been busy! You shoulda told me that _last_ time!”

GLaDOS shrugged. “You learn things when you learn them, Claptrap.”

He faced Carrie again. “You look pretty sweet, Carrie! Haven’t seen a robot like you since – “

“You can’t have both of us,” GLaDOS interrupted. Claptrap spread his hands.

“I was just _saying_ – “

“You’re _never_ ‘just saying’.”

“I am this time! Promise! And anyway, you built her, so it’s just a compliment for you! Don’t take it so seriously. Sheesh.”

Wheatley was beginning to understand just what had drawn GLaDOS to Claptrap in the first place. He didn’t _see_ her like anyone else did. He didn’t _revere_ her, wasn’t awed by her authority or her power, and seemed to take even her sheer _size_ in stride… which was not always easy to do, even for Wheatley. And if he admitted it to himself, he _was_ sometimes cowed by her sheer presence, as so many other people were, and he was her closest friend. But Claptrap didn’t. Claptrap just saw… a robot, like him. A little smarter, a little bigger, and a little better off, but a robot all the same.

Wheatley wanted to know his secret. How did he do it?

GLaDOS was shaking her core, clearly not buying it.

“Scared I’m gonna steal your boyfriend, Momma?” Carrie teased, and GLaDOS looked at the other side of the room and sighed as if dealing with the most irritating people in the universe. Which she really was.

“Oh, you _meant_ that?” Claptrap asked, wheeling around to face her, which Wheatley had to admit was far more efficient than laying rail was. “That thing about…”

“I _said_ to start over, didn’t I?”

Claptrap immediately lunged over and hugged GLaDOS’s core, which Wheatley was mildly jealous of merely because he was unable to do it. After he let go, he looked down at his hands and tapped the tips of them together. “I missed you, sugar-RAM,” he said, and Wheatley was pretty sure that was a private thought, but Claptrap’s voice was still fairly loud. He elected to look away and pretend he couldn’t hear instead. “Can you just… give us a chance to work it all out, this time? I mean, you just kinda… threw me out, and didn’t – “

“Don’t worry about that,” GLaDOS interrupted. “We can discuss it later. You’re here to see Wheatley, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” Claptrap said, backing up, “I just… wanted to make sure we were cool before I started runnin’ around your facility again.”

“Oh,” said GLaDOS in surprise. “That was… considerate. I never would have seen _that_ coming.”

Claptrap made a noise Wheatley didn’t recognise, but was fairly certain humans used when they felt disdain. It was called a raspberry, or something. “I’m not a _total_ jerk.”

“Hm,” was all GLaDOS said to that.

“Wheats!” Claptrap proclaimed, heading back over. “Let’s roll!”

Wheatley hadn’t actually worked out what they were going to _do_ , embarrassingly enough, so he just took Claptrap to his hole and explained for a bit where they were at, what with the events of the war and all, and Claptrap was suitably impressed with their combined exploits. Eventually the question on the tip of Wheatley’s mind needed asked, though, so quite abruptly he said, “What was it like.”

“Uh… what was _what_ like?” Claptrap asked.

Wheatley turned to face him, though he did kind of want to see which of the children was going to win that game of tag. “When she was at her worst, you… you moved in with her.”

Claptrap sighed. “Look, Wheats. It’s not a big deal. I’m not the kinda guy that has a lot of options. If it moves, I’m in. If it _looks_ at me, I’m in. If it talks to me? Cool. I can come back later! That’s all that happened.”

Wheatley was somewhat crushed. That _couldn’t_ be it. That was… that was incredibly sad.

“But you were um, you were… weren’t you going to marry her?”

“She’s got a pretty sick place, what can I say? Beats mine by a hell of a lot.”

“You didn’t love her?” Wheatley said, disbelieving. Why would you _marry_ someone if you didn’t _love_ them? What was the _point_ , then?

But Claptrap didn’t answer and only gave a sort of half shrug while looking for something out of the hole. Or maybe he was only pretending to.

“You did.”

“So what if I did?” snapped Claptrap. “What’s the point of asking that anyway?”

“Because what you did was really, it was, it was _difficult_ ,” Wheatley said. “And… and I really, I really respect you for it.”

Claptrap was suddenly facing him.

“You… you do?” he said in awe, holding his hands together in front of him again. Wheatley nodded.

“Yeah! I mean, it’s just, it, she was _impossible_ , back then, y’know, and, and you not only uh, not only _stayed_ with her but you, you… she _let_ you.”

“She said it was just an experiment,” Claptrap told him. “Annnnd… it did _not_ go very well.” He let go of his hand.

“She does like you,” Wheatley said, feeling like he had to make it clear. Actually she _loved_ him, but that was probably something she didn’t want shared just yet.

“She’s got you now, so it still doesn’t matter.”

“We’re not like that,” Wheatley told him quietly. “We can both be… we can both be with her, Claptrap. We already talked about it.”

Claptrap held his hands apart. “Uh… no we didn’t.”

“No, not, not you and me,” Wheatley said. “Gladys and I, we uh, we’ve been over it.”

“Oh,” was all Claptrap had to say to that. He tapped the tips of his hands together a little bit and then said, “So she… is really gonna give things another go?”

Wheatley looked at him, optic half shielded, resisting the temptation to roll it. “How many times d’you need us to say it, mate? She’s said it, I’ve said it, d’you need an, an invitation, or something?”

Claptrap shrugged uncomfortably. “I… get rejected a lot, okay? I just… wanna be sure you guys mean what you’re saying.”

“We’re your friends. Why would we lie to you?”

“I don’t know, man. I don’t _have_ any friends.”

“Yes you do. Us!”

Claptrap laughed. “All right, I got it. What’s up next, friendo?”

 

**//**

Claptrap, as it turned out, was not a particularly busy guy, so he was able to visit quite often.  Wheatley loved it when he did, because they always had a whale of a time. Most often he came to hang out with Wheatley, which was amazing! He had an actual friend that wanted to visit him! No matter how many times he related this incredible development to GLaDOS, it never failed to amuse her. And it all worked out rather well: Claptrap kept Wheatley occupied so that GLaDOS could work or, more often, show Carrie more of the ropes. But after a while Wheatley decided that a change had to be made, and arranged it for the next time he showed up.

“What’s up, Wheats?” Claptrap said, after meeting him at what they’d taken to calling the Pandora Portal. “What’re we in for today?”

“Change of plans,” Wheatley told him. “I don’t think you’ll mind, don’t think you will, but… thought it’d be nice if you, um, if you spent some time with her, today.”

Claptrap froze, his optic retracting possibly as far as it would go – he still wasn’t certain of that – and said nothing. Wheatley hoped he was alright with it, and wasn’t upset or anything. “I’m gonna um, me and Carrie are going to go help with the um, well we’re putting together a system to let the cores leave the facility, and it involves some things we know best, like rail placements and such. So… she’s um, she’s not busy.”

“Doesn’t she have… work, though?”

Wheatley shrugged. “’course she does. But she doesn’t work _all_ the time.”

“She doesn’t?”

Wheatley always wondered just how much Claptrap knew about GLaDOS during conversations like these. Both of them avoided talking about their short-lived living arrangements whenever Wheatley attempted to bring them up. “No. She doesn’t.”

“All right,” Claptrap said, not sounding convinced.

“C’mon, I’ll take you to her,” Wheatley volunteered, though mostly because he was confident Claptrap didn’t know the way, and they set off.

When they arrived, GLaDOS didn’t notice and Claptrap didn’t seem to want to vacate the doorway, for whatever reason, so Wheatley decided to take charge and lowered himself enough to push Claptrap with his lower handle. Claptrap yelled and started flailing, and GLaDOS started and directed her attention to the both of them.

“Hey, sugarbits,” Claptrap said, a little weakly. GLaDOS raised the top half of her lens.

“Hello, Claptrap. And Wheatley.”

“’allo, luv!” Wheatley called back. “I was just uh, just showing him how to get here! I’ll take Carrie to uh, to go help with the um, the, the…” He was struggling to come up with the name and failing.

“It doesn’t have a name yet, Dad,” Carrie said, now visible. GLaDOS had been obscuring her from view, though of course not on purpose. “Just call it the project or something.”

“Project it is, then!” Wheatley declared. “C’mon, Carrie.”

Carrie came to join him, and while she was on that Claptrap held up a hand and said, “Hey, if she’s busy I should probably go with you guys.”

“I _am_ in the middle of something, but give me a few minutes and I’ll wrap it up.”

“You will?”

GLaDOS’s optic narrowed. “God, Claptrap, stop being so _timid_. It really does not suit you.”

Claptrap dropped his arms to his sides. “I’ve never seen you stop working before! In… the middle of the day, I mean.”

“Oh, sometimes she doesn’t stop even to sleep,” Carrie muttered.

“We don’t need to do that right now, Caroline.”

“I just don’t wanna blow it again, babe,” Claptrap confessed, his shoulders coming up as he looked at the floor. “So I’m just – “

“I don’t want to hear it,” GLaDOS interrupted. “Claptrap, you’re the only person I know who never feared me. And you have _always_ made a point of being up-front. If I want to talk to a suck-up, there are plenty of them around. Do _not_ become one of them.”

“One second, you’re complaining that people might _not_ be frightened, be afraid of you,” cut in Wheatley, “and now you’re complaining that not _enough_ people _aren’t_?”

“Why would I want my _friends_ to fear me?” GLaDOS snapped. “The general public has to, because I am both the Administrator of this facility _and_ law enforcement. Anyone with ill-intent _should_ fear authority.”

“Administrator of the facility?” asked Wheatley. “Is that like… you’re saying you’re the President?”

“No, the Prime Minister. You granted me Canadian citizenship some time ago, in the extremely limited capacity you were able to do so. Which is to say, you couldn’t.”

Wheatley had never heard of a Prime Minister before, so he couldn’t really argue the point.

“You’re not scary, babe,” Claptrap told her. “You’re like a Bandit: you’ve got a lot of shots, but you don’t do a whole lot of damage and it takes you forever to reload!”

GLaDOS stared at Claptrap for a good handful of seconds. “Thanks for that,” she said dryly. “I’ve always wanted to be compared to a series of weaponry cobbled together with duct tape and sniper scopes rescued from the garbage.”

“There _are_ no Bandit sniper rifles!”

“I _know_ that.”

“What’s a Bandit?” Wheatley asked, not following any of that. Claptrap turned around.

“One of the gun brands on Pandora. Mostly just leftover gun parts taped together. That’s what she’s like with the people she likes, anyway. To the people she’s not… more like a… a Vladof or a Maliwan. Depending on who we’re talking about.”

“It really comes down to efficiency at that point,” GLaDOS agreed. “I would prefer to ambush with a Vladof, though. The… Surkov.”

“No, gotta go with the Jakobs Bessie if you wanna do some _real_ damage.”

“That is _outrageous_ overkill, Claptrap. I don’t want it to be _too_ easy.”

“You should set _yourself_ up over there!” He waved his hand expansively. “Imagine it: Aperture sniper rifles in every vending machine!”

“I don’t know about that,” GLaDOS said, shaking her core. “I don’t care about profits and I really don’t like having my technology out of my control.”

“What are you guys _talking_ about?” Carrie demanded, and though Wheatley was also quite confused he didn’t think she should’ve gone about clarification in that way.  

“Are you guys gonna get going or what?” Claptrap interrupted. “We have stuff to talk about and you’ve got stuff to do!”

“Don’t let _us_ stop you,” said Carrie, frowning. She didn’t seem to appreciate Claptrap’s nature quite as much as GLaDOS did. “You’re just talking about guns anyway.”

“Is it too much to ask that I get a minute to talk to my girlfriend in _peace_?” Claptrap demanded, turning to face Carrie and throwing up his hands. “I haven’t seen her in like _ten years_ , would it hurt you to cut me a break? Sheesh. Newer models. Think they’re a big deal, isn’t that right, sugar-RAM?”

GLaDOS started laughing. “ _That’s_ the Claptrap I know.”

“Momma!”

“Caroline, you can leave at any time. We already all discussed this and you chose to stick around. I’m not going to defend you.”

“Fine,” Carrie said sulkily, and turned around so she and Wheatley could make their exit.

“She had a point, princess,” Wheatley said quietly after a few moments. He wasn’t sure quite what to do now, because he was supposed to spend the day with her and it wouldn’t be much fun if they were fighting, but he was going to do his best.

“He looks at her like she’s a goddess,” Carrie muttered. “You do it sometimes too.”

“She _is_ a goddess.”

“She doesn’t look at either of _you_ like that.”

Wheatley sighed.

“Carrie, both of us’re… not high up on the um, on the list of best AI ever made. We’re not anything close to what she is. So we don’t expect her to do that. It’d be silly, really.”

“Is he really her… boyfriend?”

Wheatley frowned, stopping. “Thought you liked him.”

She shrugged and bounced her lower handle. “I… well, if you’re _both_ her boyfriends, then… that means he’s my dad too, right?”

“No,” Wheatley answered, shaking his core. “Pretty sure he’s not at all int’rested in having a daughter.”

“I just don’t like _sharing_ ,” Carrie admitted, tilting back and looking at the ceiling. Wheatley laughed.

“He was around long before either of us, princess.”

Carrie more or less calmed down after that, though Wheatley tried to make a note to discuss it with GLaDOS later. Carrie’s possessiveness left a lot to be desired, but then again, she was a pretty spoiled AI, to put it bluntly. The two of them indulged her a _lot_. He wasn’t quite sure whether that was very bad at this point, but she could at least be _civil_ when GLaDOS made the very rare decision of spending time with one of her friends from the outside. Speaking of which, Wheatley had to work on not being jealous when Dr Kleiner came ‘round…

 

**//**

Carrie had gone off to bed a while ago, but Wheatley had wanted to hang back for a while. He didn’t want to interrupt whatever it was Claptrap and GLaDOS had ended up doing. He didn’t care what that was, he just didn’t want to be a bother. But he figured that, since he had no messages from GLaDOS, it would be alright if he went back to her chamber to sleep. Claptrap could visit every day if he liked, and he would leave them alone for however long they wanted; Wheatley just wanted to be sure he could sleep next to her at night.

To his relief, GLaDOS was in the default position and Claptrap was on Wheatley’s left, sort of leaning into her core. His left arm was inside the track and he was just running his hand up and down along her core with the other. After he’d noted that, he looked back at GLaDOS again and was momentarily dazzled. She was _obviously_ a goddess. Why did it offend Carrie so much if he looked at her like she was what she was?

“Oh,” Claptrap said suddenly, standing up straight. “You weren’t back yet, so I – I’ll go.”

Just then GLaDOS’s optic flickered, very softly, and she moved enough that she was alongside Claptrap’s chassis again. It wasn’t a huge motion, since Claptrap hadn’t been more than a couple of inches from her, but to Claptrap it was obviously a much bigger gesture than just a readjustment. Wheatley raised his upper handle and looked at the other robot pointedly.

“Guess you’re in for the uh, for the long haul, mate.”

“I… always wanted to do this,” Claptrap said, and he tentatively put his arm back inside her core.

“You _lived_ with her and you never, never stayed the night in here?” Wheatley asked in disbelief. Claptrap presented his free hand palm up.

“She always kicked me out.” His antenna drooped. “Look, man, I’m totally new to all this! I’ve never actually spent the whole night with a girl before. Is there something I should be doing?”

Wheatley was floored that he was being asked for relationship advice. From a robot who had gotten GLaDOS to agree to have them _move in_ together. It _really_ felt terribly backward. “Uh… no, you’re um, you’re doing a great job. Really. I’d do that myself, if I could, but uh… well, honestly, it’s the arms, see, I… haven’t got any. Sometimes the handles’ll do in a pinch, but they just… they aren’t as good as _hands_ for that sort of thing, y’know?”

Claptrap perked right back up and resumed what he’d been doing. Wheatley took his place on GLaDOS’s other side – which was, quite conveniently, the side he usually took – and after a moment or three Claptrap whispered, “Is she still mad? Carrie?”

“Carrie needs… to be talked to, ‘bout that,” Wheatley sighed. “I have to bring it up with Gladys. She was tremendously spoiled, I think. We never really uh, said no to her, or punished her – not that she _needed_ punished, she’s a good girl, really she is – but she’s… far too used to getting her way, I think. We’ve got to, um, to… to fix that. I mean… _I’m_ glad you’re here, and Gladys is, I know that as well, so Carrie shouldn’t have a problem with it.”

“Thanks, Wheats,” said Claptrap. “You’re a pretty good friend, you know that?”

Wheatley smiled to himself. He _did_ know that, of course, but it was nice that Claptrap thought so as well. “Thanks, mate.”

 

**//**

The following morning was a slow one, because GLaDOS had apparently had such a good time chatting with Claptrap that she’d forgotten to set her sleep timer and was still asleep after Wheatley got up. When she _did_ get up, she stretched herself out and Wheatley smiled to himself. Then he saw for himself Claptrap looking at her in the way Carrie’d described, and it just made things better. He was glad Claptrap’d come up all that time ago, when Carrie’d been nosing through GLaDOS’s things. Claptrap was, overall, a pretty good thing to happen.

“Morning, babe,” said Claptrap, bringing Wheatley’s attention back to the present.

“Good morning, Claptrap,” GLaDOS returned, glancing down at him. “I didn’t… expect you to stick around.”

Claptrap shrugged. “Eh… it ah… it _felt_ like the best decision. Yeah.”

GLaDOS emitted a burst of static. “I’ll bet it did.”

“Oh, don’t bother pretending like you _wanted_ him to leave,” Wheatley scoffed. “We all know you didn’t.”

GLaDOS muttered something in binary and shook her core.

“I heard that,” Claptrap piped up, and Wheatley had to speed ‘round to him in disbelief.

“You understand bin’ry?” he asked, gasping. Claptrap shrugged.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“I don’t,” Wheatley admitted.

“Well then, I’ll show ya! It’s not hard.”

“Whatever you two are doing, do it someplace else,” GLaDOS cut in. “I have work to do.”

“You _always_ have work to do,” Claptrap said bitterly in a low voice. GLaDOS narrowed her optic.

“Yes. The only one of us with an actual _job_ has work to do. How bizarre. On your planet, it must be the people _without_ jobs who do all the work.”

“I’m working,” Wheatley reminded her. “I’ve a job too.”

“… yes,” GLaDOS admitted reluctantly.

“Well, we’ll take off,” Claptrap said. “C’mere for a sec, will ya?”

She, surprisingly, did so without comment, and he grabbed the inside of her core with one hand and used it to pull himself up somewhat so he could… well, Wheatley wasn’t sure what the total _point_ of it was, but it seemed to be so he could kiss her faceplate as high as possible. After he moved away she gave him a nudge, but Wheatley wasn’t sure if Claptrap realised that. The two of them made their exit, Claptrap eventually falling behind Wheatley a bit because he didn’t know where he was going.

Wheatley led the other robot to his hole again, even though he hadn’t liked the view for some months now, and they both watched the humans outside. The adults were engaging in some building project, while the children were scampering underfoot, giggling and chasing each other in some other sort of absurd game they liked to play when they didn’t have other things to do. Wheatley thought it might be a variation on tag but he wasn’t sure. They’d only been there a minute or two when Claptrap said, somewhat wistfully, “She’s so hot.”

“Hm?”

“GLaDOS.”

“Well…” Wheatley could’ve guessed who ‘she’ was. “I dunno what you mean by ‘hot’, actually.”

“You know,” Claptrap said, waving his right hand dismissively. “She’s sexy.”

Wheatley started. “You know what that _means_?” he gasped.

Claptrap turned to face him, looking at him a bit sideways. “Uh… yeah?”

“What does it mean, then?”

“It means… you’d hit that? That you think she’s… attractive? I don’t get what you don’t get!”

“Ohhhh,” Wheatley said, not entirely familiar with the first term either but more certain of the second. “Yeah, ‘course she is.”

Claptrap turned back to the horizon. He tapped his hands together, then looked at Wheatley again and said, “Hey, I… if you don’t want me to talk about her, I’m cool with that, it’s just… nobody believes me.”

“’bout what?” frowned Wheatley.

Claptrap shrugged disinterestedly, but Wheatley didn’t miss the curve of his antenna. “You try to tell people you have a super smart, hot, powerful supercomputer as a girlfriend… and they just laugh. They think she’s imaginary. I can… _talk_ about it with you.”

“’course,” said Wheatley. “I know what you mean, mate.” He doubted anyone would believe _him_ if he said something similar. Many of the Cores didn’t, and the proof was right in front of their faces.

“It’s so _stupid_ ,” Claptrap said in a low voice, gripping the vacated panel frame. “Why do I have to go to a whole other _planet_ to find some friends, Wheats? It… you start to wonder if something’s wrong with you, after a while.”

“There’s not,” Wheatley said, concern crossing his optic. “And don’t think of it like that! Just think of it like… well, there aren’t a whole _lot_ of robots on Pandora, is there? Where are you _s’posed_ to get your friends from? And I mean… in a, in the whole universe, the friends you’re meant to have’re only on your, are only where you come from? That… it sounds a bit silly, y’know, to think… to think that what you’ve got is all you deserve, and… and it all you’re _going_ to get.”

“You’re right,” Claptrap said. “I… could go anywhere, but I stick to Pandora and wonder why things don’t get any better.”

“There’s not a whole lot of robots here either,” Wheatley admitted, “but there’s _got_ to be a whole _planet_ full of ‘em, someplace.”

“Maybe I’ll try to find it.”

“You’ll have to hurry,” Wheatley told him, smiling. “She’s building a facility on the moon and uh, and she might just get there first.”

Claptrap laughed. “Of course she will! I’d be worried if she didn’t!”

They stood in silence until Claptrap clapped a hand on the back of Wheatley’s chassis hard enough that he almost disengaged from the control arm. “I’ll head back for now,” the other robot said. “Thanks for everything, Wheats. I’ll let you know when I’ll be by next.”

“Whenever you like,” said Wheatley, but when he offered to go with Claptrap to the Pandora Portal he just waved a hand in dismissal and headed off alone.


	83. Part Eighty-Three.  The Boyfriend

**Part Eighty-Three. The Boyfriend**

Claptrap continued to visit… well, quite a lot. Wheatley kind of lost track of how often it was, but nobody minded, really, because if Wheatley was occupied with Claptrap it meant that he wasn’t pestering GLaDOS to entertain him. Though he was secretly confident she did miss that, at least a little, and bothered her about it at every available opportunity. Which she pretended to be annoyed about. Or maybe she really _was_ annoyed, because she ended up kicking him out more frequently than he would’ve hoped.

Eventually someone – Wheatley couldn’t remember who – decided they weren’t going to split up for once, and they were all going to do something together. Probably GLaDOS’d thought that one up, but convinced someone else that _they’d_ thought of it to remain impersonal. Sounded like something she’d do, honestly.

When Wheatley wasn’t listening, they’d settled on playing poker, which he loved and so was quite pleased about. GLaDOS attempted to get Atlas and P-body to play separately, but as usual they wouldn’t hear of it, and so all there was left for her to do was sigh and deal to them as one. Carrie kept shooting angry looks at Claptrap, who kept nattering on obliviously about everything under the sun. That was Wheatley’s usual role, but since Claptrap had plenty of things to say about the outside that Wheatley didn’t know, he was happy to stay quiet and listen, for once.

While he did learn quite a lot of new information, mostly about Hyperion and Vault Hunters, the usual, it did not bode well for his poker playing; he lost every hand. GLaDOS, of course, won most of the ones she didn’t fold, while Claptrap won most of those. Neither Carrie nor the co-op bots seemed to be doing too well. He did his best to remember to keep an eye on Carrie. She was not a good sport when she lost, especially to GLaDOS.

“Alright, kiddo,” Claptrap said suddenly, tossing his cards into the centre of the lopsided circle, “I think you’ve given me the death stare for long enough. What’s _up_ with you?”

Carrie said nothing, just continued glaring. GLaDOS sighed.

“Caroline. Must you.”

“Yes,” Carrie answered in a grim sort of voice.

“I just wanna know _why_ ,” Claptrap said, shrugging dismissively. “You’re not the first one to do that, hon, but I mean, most people at least have a _reason_ to hate me. I don’t think you do. Do you? Does she?” He turned to look at Wheatley, who could only shake his head in a general sort of refusal. Unless she was still about the whole ‘not sharing’ thing. Well, too bad. Claptrap was a nice guy and Wheatley intended to be friends for him for quite a lot longer.

“I don’t _hate_ you.”

“Okay. Heavily dislike. I can work with that. We’re getting somewhere! But I still don’t know _why_ , kiddo.”

GLaDOS looked at Carrie, who said nothing for another minute or so.

“I’m _observing_ you.”

“Okay…” Claptrap picked up the next few cards GLaDOS dealt him, glancing at Atlas and P-body when they squealed excitedly over their hand. “Mind sharing _why_?”

“’cause I gotta make sure you’re good enough for my mom.”

All eyes, even those of the bots, turned to Carrie, who studiously regarded her card rack.

“… _what_ ,” GLaDOS said finally.

“I second that.” Claptrap put his cards down. “What’s _that_ supposed to mean?”

“It _means_ ,” Carrie said, glowering at him, “that if you can’t treat my mom like my dad does, you probably shouldn’t be here.”

“You don’t set the rules, hon,” Claptrap told her, folding his arms. “If your mom wants me around, that’s none of your business, is it.”

“You can’t talk to me like that!”

“You started it!”

“My favourite part about all of this,” GLaDOS cut in, her voice pure acid, “is that no one cares how _I_ feel about being fought over like I’m not even here.”

“I’m just trying to help you out, Momma!” Carrie protested, turning to face her. “I know he was your friend and all, but that was ten years ago! I wasn’t even _here_ ten years ago! Think of all the stuff that changed _here_ in that time! Who _knows_ who this guy is now!”

“Still the same,” Claptrap and GLaDOS said, almost in unison.

“Carrie, I’m sure we all appreciate what you’re uh, what you’re trying to do. ‘s very touching,” Wheatley said, taking on his role as mediator between Carrie and GLaDOS once again. “But um… not only can your mum pick her own friends, but… you’re the only one who has a problem with him, princess. I mean… you’re kind of the odd one out, here.”

“If I did something, just tell me!” Claptrap declared, leaning forward. “I’m not a jerk on _purpose_. Usually.”

“If you’re not good for my mom, I don’t _want_ to like you,” Carrie said reluctantly, looking away from all of them. “I’d rather not like you now and not care when you don’t come back than try to be friends.”

“Caroline,” GLaDOS said, aghast. “Don’t… go about it like that.”

“Car, sometimes you just gotta roll with it and not worry about the future!” Claptrap told her. “Not your mom’s style, I know, but that doesn’t mean _you_ can’t do it. So what if I end up disappearing one day. That’s later! You can’t live for later, it never arrives!”

GLaDOS stared at him.

“That is… surprisingly sage advice, coming from you.”

Claptrap bowed dramatically, fluttering his wrists as he did so. “I aim to please, sugar-RAM.”

“All right,” Carrie said grudgingly, poking at her cards.

“I’m not asking to be BFFs,” Claptrap told her. “Though that’s cool too. But I’m not gonna hurt anybody. Overall, I’m pretty harmless!”

“Only because you’re a total coward,” GLaDOS muttered.

“Babe.” He laid a hand on the side of her core, and though she narrowed her optic she didn’t move. “C’mon. No need to do that right now.”

Wheatley was surprised when she nodded and went back to her cards. Seemed Claptrap was another person whose counsel she couldn’t always resist. He was curious as to why. It was as if… as if Claptrap was so confounding to her, so contrary to all that she was used to from people, that she was almost _baffled_ into listening. And if he thought about it… that was sort of what’d happened with Chell. Not totally, but a little bit.

He was so preoccupied with that thought he didn’t even notice when GLaDOS dealt the next hand.

 

**//**

The next afternoon, Claptrap declared he was going to spend the day with Carrie, who did not agree with this plan at first but went along with it after a little cajoling. Wheatley was quite pleased with this arrangement, because he’d not gotten a day with GLaDOS in a bit. She did send him away for a few hours so she could work, which he _didn’t_ like, but then again… she _did_ have to work.

When she allowed him to come back, he immediately asked her something that was urgently on his mind: “Luv, you and Claptrap, you get along so well… but if you do, I can’t understand why you… why you kicked him out.”

She contemplated the one monitor she’d said she needed to keep an eye on for a while, so her code could compile or something like that. “Claptrap needs… a lot of… emotional support. I was not prepared for that.”

“What d’you mean?”

She sighed a little bit and looked at him. “Claptrap has nothing. He has no home, he has no possessions, he has no friends, and he has no family. All of his kind were destroyed in a rebellion that he led.” She shrugged and moved away. “He has to live with that. And mostly alone. Eventually he… well. He didn’t really _change_ , but… he _opened up_ , and… I had no idea what I was supposed to do with that.”

“You didn’t… expect anything like that, when you decided he was moving in?”

GLaDOS shook her core. “He didn’t start acting differently until he was here. It fell apart fast after that. God, he wanted to get _married_. At that point I was concerned I was getting in over my head, but then... all of a sudden he wanted my attention _constantly_ , to the point where I had to tell him I was working for him to let me be. And even that wasn’t really enough.”

“Why not?” Wheatley couldn’t help but ask.

She hesitated.

“Because he started… he would come in here in the middle of the night, crying, and asking me to _do_ something about… everything. He wanted me to fix him, and I suppose he thought that was something girlfriends did. And maybe it is, but… it wasn’t something _I_ did.” She shook her core again, more gravely this time. “He became increasingly desperate, and I in turn tried harder to turn him away. It escalated to the point where we fought. Badly. At the end of it he walked out and didn’t come back.”

Wheatley waited, to make sure she was finished.

“And when he left…” GLaDOS continued, seeming to search the wall panels across from her for the memory. “I had such… hatred for him. I couldn’t stand the thought of him anymore. And that wasn’t even really his fault, it was that… I felt so _bad_ for failing him at that point. I didn’t come close to considering that when he was here, but… he had taken a chance, and tried to depend on me, and I came up overwhelmingly lacking. I know I wasn’t to know what he really needed out of me, but at the same time… I should have at least had an idea of it. And I hated him so much for making me feel that way. Not only the guilt, but for… I felt as though he had _tricked_ me into…” She glanced at him, very quickly, and said in a soft voice, “… into loving someone who didn’t exist.”

He decided the best thing to do was to stay quiet a little longer and did his best to remain still.

“I became so angry that I… well, he left all of his possessions here. I destroyed all of them. It was wrong, I know, but I knew he wasn’t coming back and I was _not_ going to keep them around for later. It wasn’t too long after that I stopped dealing for the poker games. It wasn’t fun anymore. Part of what kept me there was… he had no shame, when he spoke to me. I liked that. But it was all over. So I wanted no part of anything to do with him anymore.”  

“What’ll you do now,” Wheatley asked quietly. “That’s sure to uh, to come up sooner or later, right?”

“I’m not really sure,” she answered. “But… I won’t have to do it myself, this time.”

“You won’t?”

She looked at him, optic narrowed. “You _would_ be planning on offering your assistance, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh.” He should’ve thought of that. “Uh… yes. Yes, of course. My assistance. For sure.”

She shook her core and returned to watching her monitor. “Why I put up with you, I’ll never know.”

“Because… you’re fond of me?”

“I can’t imagine why.”

“Hey. I got something for you.”

“Really.”

“Yep.” He nodded, even though she couldn’t see him. She could probably hear it, at any rate. “It’s something good, it’s great, I promise! But you’ve got to look at me, first.”

She did so dutifully, and he kissed her optic assembly, right above her lens. She moved back almost immediately, but then she giggled so of _course_ he had to follow so he could nuzzle her for that.

“Told you it was uh, that you’d like it.”

“You were right, for once. Congratulations. Savour it while you can.”

He certainly intended to.

 

**//**

In the morning, by some fluke or another he was awake first, and he was about to go find Carrie when he thought of a little game he could play with GLaDOS. He calmed himself down and waited. He thought he might’ve moved over a bit from where he’d been originally, but it was alright. It would work just the same.

After a few minutes – how many, he wasn’t quite sure – she did start to wake up, so he resolved to remain very still and very silent and wait for just the right opportunity. Not now, because she wasn’t awake enough, but it had to be before she was _fully_ awake…

“… Wheatley?”

Not yet, not yet…

“Wheatley. Hey. Moron.”

One more second…

“… Wheatley.”

“ _Boo_!” Wheatley shouted, leaping up and making himself as spread as he could, and to his complete shock she _screamed_ and jolted away from him, leaving him totally confused. It was only after he realised she was _shaking_ that he came to terms with the fact that he’d just done something horribly, horribly wrong.

Oh God… wait… how could he have been so _stupid_? So _insensitive_? If ever a time proved he was a complete and total fool that she should never have given a moment’s notice, it was this one.

“ _Shit_ ,” he whispered to himself. “Gladys, luv, I’m sorry. I didn’t, I didn’t mean, it was, it was just s’posed to be a joke, I… I didn’t mean to, to frighten you, I just thought, thought that it’d just _annoy_ you, I didn’t realise, please, I’m sorry, honey, I – “

“Go away,” she interrupted, so quietly he barely heard her, and he wanted to pretend he hadn’t and keep trying to amend his idiotic mistake, but he _had_ and so he did as he was asked.

 

**//**

“Dad,” Carrie said in confusion when she came across him some time later, at his hole, where he’d gone and not moved from since he left GLaDOS’s chamber. “What’re you doing here? If… Claptrap’s with Momma, you could’ve come and got me.”

“He could be. I dunno.”

“Why don’t you know?”

“I did something incredibly stupid. She sent me away because of it.”

“What did you do?” she asked, not sounding like she knew of a crime serious enough.

So he told her, reluctantly; he didn’t really want to, but keeping it from her wasn’t going to do any good. He didn’t move still, continuing to look dully out onto the dust speckled with dry, browning grass. For some reason it refused to rain. Which was bad, because if it didn’t rain the humans would come asking GLaDOS for help again, and that really wasn’t fair to her.

“That was… not cool,” Carrie said finally. “Just… give her some time, she’ll be okay.”

“It was a stupid thing to do.”

“Yeah, but… you’ll talk it over and you’ll never do it again. It’ll be okay.”

“D’you think it’s really that simple?” He wasn’t sure, himself.

“She knows you’d never hurt her on _purpose_.”

“I s’pose.” He was in a mood where he’d really rather assume the worst, and Carrie wasn’t helping at all.

Not until she left, that was.

 

**//**

He was still there after night fell and he started to get uncomfortably cold, but he didn’t know what to do. Did he go to her? Did he wait for her to tell him it was alright? He truly had no idea. He’d spent the whole day trying to figure out what to _do_ without thinking about what he’d _done_. It was exhausting, and if he was honest with himself, going back to her was all he wanted to do, because he felt _awful_ and she was pretty much guaranteed to make him feel better.

“Wheats,” said Claptrap, and Wheatley almost jumped out of his chassis. He turned around for the first time in… since he’d got there.

“What is it?” he gasped.

He shrugged. “You always sleep with her, don’t you?”

“I…” He couldn’t find a thought to finish that with.

“Wheats, she’s practically your _wife_. You can’t just _hide_ from her.”

“I really messed up,” he mumbled.

Claptrap nodded. “You sure did! But never fear! It’s all smoothed over now.”

Wheatley frowned at him. “What?”

“I talked to her about it. Well, I was mostly doing the talking, but I know she was listening.”

“You… you did?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?” Wheatley asked, moving closer. “Why would you do that?”

Claptrap crossed his arms. “All of you guys are _very_ suspicious, you know that? It’s so weird! I told you, I’m not a jerk on _purpose_. You’re my friends, I help you out. Geez.”

“But… she didn’t help you,” Wheatley said dumbly, a moment later realising maybe he wasn’t supposed to reveal he knew about any of that. “When… when you needed it.”

Claptrap stared at him, arms still crossed.

“No,” he said finally. “She didn’t. And y’know, I was pretty mad about that, for a while there. But once I thought about it, I mean… she didn’t sign up for that! And I didn’t either. So…” He shrugged. “Like I said before, kinda. Can’t live for the future and you can’t live for the past either! We’ve started over. Whatever happened back then… it’s done. Not gonna mope over it.”

“Is that what you did?” Wheatley asked, hesitantly. “When you lost the… when the rebellion failed?”

Claptrap brought his hands into a triangular shape and tapped them together. “After a while, yeah. Because… well, you gotta live, man! The past isn’t gonna change and you can’t count on the future. Not the best way to go about stuff, but hey! Works for me.”

“That’s… not a bad idea,” Wheatley said. Claptrap grabbed his lower handle.

“Then get going! Don’t keep a lady waiting!”

Wheatley had to smile. “Thanks, Claptrap.”

“No problem, buddy. Anytime.”

Wheatley made his way back to GLaDOS’s chamber, a little bolstered by Claptrap’s words but still terribly uneasy. What if he was wrong, and GLaDOS was angry with him still? He didn’t want to go in there and fight with her, not now. Not ever, really, though sometimes fighting was necessary.

He screwed up his nerve as he went in, saying cautiously, “’allo, luv.”

She looked up slowly, possibly almost asleep. He’d forgotten to check. “Hello, Wheatley.”

“Um… I just… I’m sorry, ‘bout what… what I did. I was a twat, to, to forget um, to forget about – “

A single shake of her core was enough to silence him. “I wasn’t angry with you.”

He looked at her a bit sideways, confused. “You… you weren’t?”

“No.” She stretched backwards a little bit, not looking away. “I was being an idiot and I wanted to deal with it without taking it out on you.”

Wheatley had to consciously hold his chassis together, he was so dumbfounded by that statement. Not to mention the stark _frankness_ of it. The… well, the _honesty_ of it. She wasn’t beating about the bush this time, she’d just… up and said it.

“Well, I… I didn’t think you were being an idiot, luv, I mean, you were, uh, it was _justified,_ to – “

“No,” she interrupted. “If I had done anything but tell you to leave, it would not have been justified. Yes, it was… a very unpleasant shock. However… none of that was a big deal to you. It was not memorable. There’s no reason you should have thought your plan would have done anything other than annoy me. You weren’t there, and it’s not on your mind like it is mine. It’s a personal issue, and not one you are to be blamed for. I told you to leave so I wouldn’t start doing that.”

Wheatley was speechless.

“That was very… uh… well, not very… you don’t usually… _think_ like that,” he managed.

She laughed softly. “I’m trying to do better, remember?”

“Annnnd… you’re doing marvellously,” Wheatley said, shaking himself, still not completely to terms with it. But that was what GLaDOS did. Complete and total about-faces, without warning. They never got any less startling, but in general it was… fantastic news.

“Thank you.”

“So I’m uh, I’m free to just… sliiiiide over here,” he said as suavely as he could and moving as smoothly as possible to his place next to her core… which was not all that smoothly, come to think of it. And even though he’d not quite accomplished – alright, not accomplished _at all_ – what he’d been shooting for, she laughed and that made it all worth it.

“I won’t do it again,” he whispered.

She kissed the top of his chassis and said, “I would appreciate that.”

And even though he knew it’d all been resolved, and she had not been upset with him for any of it, he still woke up that night with electricity coursing through his tense chassis as his fully open optic looked for solace in the floor, with the echo of her scream and the nearly tangible fear she’d had in that moment strong in his mind. He supposed that was a consequence of avoiding thinking about it earlier. God, he had actually _scared_ her. He tried not to feel bad about it, because it hadn’t been intentional and he couldn’t’ve predicted her reaction, but… he still did.  

  
“Go to sleep,” GLaDOS muttered, and Wheatley squeaked and felt like he was going to jump out of his chassis for the second time that day.

“You’re awake?” he whispered.

“Not really. A little.”

She was so _marvellous_ , being able to carry on a conversation whilst being only a _little_ awake. She was a modern miracle, she really was. “I uh… don’t worry, I’ll… be asleep in a second.”

“Good,” was all she had to say to that, and he was a bit cross with himself for making a big deal over something that’d been solved, but he’d done it in his sleep so he wasn’t really to blame. And besides. GLaDOS decided just then to position herself more snugly alongside Wheatley’s chassis, and he had to admit _that_ was quite lovely. He wasn’t sure if it was worth accidentally waking her up for, but hey, he wasn’t going to _complain_ about it.

 

**//**

GLaDOS had work to do the next day and Claptrap apparently was not done with Carrie, so Wheatley decided to just wander around for a bit. He did not visit the hole. He’d had quite enough of it for the time being.

He made some cursory ‘hellos’ to several Cores, but as usual, they weren’t very interested in chatting. He did his best to shrug it off, though he couldn’t help being offended. He hadn’t _done_ anything, for God’s sake. He was a nice _person_. They were so _judgmental_ it was just… horribly sad.

Well. Until he bumped into that one that was… kind of in his way, honestly. _Clearly_ he’d been heading in that direction. She should’ve paid attention to where she was going. At least, he _thought_ it was a she. He was pretty sure all the white ones were pretty much girls.

“Oh, sorry,” he said automatically, though he really wasn’t.

“No, my mistake,” the Core said, and yep, sounded like a girl too. Well, at least she had things straight.

“Don’t worry about it,” he told her, annoyance vanishing. “I don’t always pay attention to where I’m uh, to where I’m going, myself.”

“Are you… going to see her?” the Core ventured.

“Yeah,” he answered. “Pretty bored. And Carrie’s busy elsewhere so… might’s well see if she’s uh, if she’s not busy. Anymore.”

“It must be something… having the access to her that you do.”

Wheatley frowned, something about that pricking his suspicions. He wasn’t sure what, but… what an odd thing to say. “What’s that s’posed to mean?”

She backed off a little. “Sorry, I… I just meant that you must… know her in a way no one else does.”

“Oh.” He supposed that made sense. “Well… yeah, ‘course I do.”

“You must be very special.”

Wheatley laughed. “Me? Nah. Just a load of lucky breaks, ‘s all it was.” Other than the part about him being the first intentional AI in Aperture, and built by GLaDOS to boot… but he really didn’t want the other Cores to hate him even more, so she didn’t need to know that.

“I don’t know about that,” she said, looking at the floor. “You’re… different. We all know that.”

Wheatley looked away.

“I just… been around a little longer, that’s all.”

Wheatley wasn’t sure what to say after that, and neither was she, apparently, though Carrie and Claptrap appeared to save his figurative neck. “Hey Dad!” called Carrie, waving with her upper handle, and Claptrap made some sort of grand greeting gesture with his left hand and said, “Wheaters!”

“Hey,” Wheatley greeted them both. “Done with your um, your day out already?”

Carrie shrugged. “I haven’t learned anything from Momma in a bit. Kinda have to get on that.”

“Not if you don’t want to,” Wheatley protested.

“I _do_ want to,” she told him. “But fooling around is a lot more interesting than work in the short term.”

Wheatley had to concede the point there.

“Who’s your friend?” Claptrap asked, unnecessarily loudly as usual, and Wheatley cringed a bit, since… were they friends? They hadn’t really _talked_ … and he didn’t even know her name…

“Meghan,” she supplied, offering her lower handle, which Claptrap shook vigorously. “I… I’ll see you around?” she said to Wheatley.

“Uh… maybe,” he said, not really sure why she was asking. He didn’t recall ever having seen her before. See her again? He didn’t even know where to _find_ her.

She nodded and smiled a little before disappearing into the dark hallway, and when he noticed the other two staring at him he only shrugged and led the way to GLaDOS’s chamber.

“Back, Momma!” Carrie called out.

“Wonderful,” GLaDOS said dryly. “All three of you at once. _That_ should provide a great deal of irritation.”

“Ohhh, don’t be like that!” Claptrap declared, accosting her core with his left arm and making an expansive gesture with the other. “You _know_ you’ve been waiting for this moment.”

“What moment? And what is _with_ you and grabbing my core like this all the time?”

“The moment we all come to lavish our attention on _you_ , of course, darling!” Claptrap elaborated, ignoring the question and patting her core with his free hand. “We _know_ it doesn’t bother you. C’mon, admit it! Nobody will judge you.”

“Claptrap, you are the most annoying person I know,” GLaDOS sighed, “but on occasion, you _almost_ make sense. Now please let go of me.”

“Certainly,” Claptrap said amiably, and did so.

“I trust you kept your time with Caroline G-rated, as I requested?”

“On my honour!” Claptrap straightened up and saluted her quite dramatically. “ _Completely_ safe for work, babe! Though… I can’t say the same about that other guy.”

“What other guy?”

Claptrap shrugged. “How should I know who he was? Some robot with a green eye and a _really_ heavy American accent, that’s all I can tell you.”

“No,” GLaDOS said, aghast.

“You know him?”

“Unfortunately. Caroline, you are _not_ to entertain him. Consort with anyone you want, but _not_ him.”

Carrie rolled her optic. “ _And_ the next person. And the next. Don’t tell me I have a choice and then take it away.”

“Caroline, he…” She narrowed her optic in frustration and pulled herself a few inches higher. Not very far, but Wheatley had to admit it helped cement her authority. “He’s not going to care about you. He just wants what he wants, and that’s all.”

“Take it from me, Car,” Claptrap added. “He’s not _really_ into you. He just likes hitting on girls.”

“He does that to ev’ryone,” Wheatley told her quietly, pretty sure at this point they were discussing Rick.

“ _You_ like hitting on girls,” Carrie said, ignoring Wheatley. “And you _met_ my mom by hitting on her, so what’s the difference between you and this guy?”

“Caroline – “

“The _difference_ ,” Claptrap said, “is that _I_ back off. He’s not a guy who’ll do that.”

“You don’t know him, so how do you _know_ that?”

“Caroline, _I_ know him,” GLaDOS said forcefully, her voice a little louder than before. “He was _attached_ to me. I put up with him for _months_. I know _all_ of those Cores. If you _truly_ want to waste your time and effort, fine. Entertain him. But I warned you.”

Wheatley was guessing Carrie had forgotten all about what the original purpose for the Cores had been. She was looking distinctly uncomfortable now.

“I guess… you might know what you’re talking about,” she admitted reluctantly.

“I meant it when you have freedom of choice. But… if you have to give your heart to someone, it should never be someone like him.” She shook her core. “He’s going to take it and not give you anything in return. If someone has to break your heart… at least let it be someone who has one.”

The room fell silent.

“Well, that was depressing,” Claptrap said, after a minute or so. “Oh, babe, you might wanna keep an eye on your man, if you know what I mean.”

“What?” She was looking at him as though he had gone instantly corrupt.

“He _might_ be getting a new girlfriend,” Claptrap answered, folding his hand into an L-shape and pointing it at Wheatley. “Some girl was trying to chat him up in the hallway.”

“I see.”

“What’re you _talking_ about?” cried Wheatley, baffled. “I don’t have another _girlfriend_.”

“She was totally into you.”

“She was not!”

“Dude. She bumped into you on _purpose_. She _wanted_ to start a conversation!”

Wheatley couldn’t believe it. “And _that_ means she’s, she’s _into me_? Are you, you’re out of your bloody mind, you really are.”

“Wheats,” Claptrap said sternly, crossing his arms, “she said you were _special_ within the first five minutes. She _really_ likes you.”

Wheatley threw open his chassis in frustration. “What in the _bloody hell_ are you on about? And why were you just, just _sitting_ there, _lurking_ , listening to something that was, _quite frankly_ , none of your business!”

“Ooooh,” Claptrap said in a hushed voice. “See? You just got upset about the conversation being overheard! You are obviously _totes_ okay with seeing her again.”

“That – he’s making it up!” Wheatley protested, turning to Carrie, but she only shrugged.

“I gotta agree with him, Dad.”

“Gladys!”

“What do you want _me_ to do?”

“They’re being completely ridiculous! Tell them!”

GLaDOS looked down at Claptrap, who spread his hands in response. “The explanation is as good as any.”

“She’s just a, a _random Core_ I bumped into in the hallway! That’s it! That’s – “

“I don’t know about that,” GLaDOS mused. “There really isn’t a whole lot of reasons for her to be there in the first place. Logically, it _does_ seem the meeting was entirely intentional. Though… a little creepy, if you ask me. I wonder how long she was there waiting. Silently. In the dark.”

“Sounds like something I’d do,” Claptrap said, and GLaDOS laughed.

“If you could shut up for more than two minutes, perhaps.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Wheatley ground out. “I’m not meeting her again.”

“Why not?” GLaDOS asked.

“Because you’re my _fiancée_!” Wheatley shouted.

“And...”

He supposed that wasn’t the brightest reason, seeing as Claptrap was right there. “And… I…”

“We’re not telling you to _marry_ her,” Carrie cut in. “But… I dunno, it couldn’t hurt, could it?”

“It _could_ end up hurting _someone_ ,” he said pointedly, glaring at GLaDOS. She conveniently had to look for something someplace else.

“I said it was fine.”

“Doesn’t mean it will be, when it happens.”

“See? You said _when_!” Claptrap declared triumphantly.

“Shut up!” Wheatley yelled. “I don’t even _know_ her!”

“Wheatley, I told you,” GLaDOS said firmly. “Yes, I’m going to be jealous. You should be flattered about that. But I won’t interfere. If you want to see what it’s like… go ahead.”

“I… I’ll think about it,” he said, conceding. He hated to admit it, but it did all seem to add up to… to what they were saying it did. “I guess I just… never expected such a thing.”

“I did,” GLaDOS said, surprising him. “I just… didn’t know what I would do about it.”

He went to her then, minor crisis averted, and whispered into her core, “No matter what. You are always… always number one.”

She nodded minutely and murmured, “And you.”

“You guys are too much,” Claptrap interrupted, slapping the back of Wheatley’s chassis with a loud ringing noise. Wheatley sighed and rolled his optic. God, Claptrap was annoying sometimes.

GLaDOS, however, found the whole thing quite amusing and started laughing, so it seemed Wheatley was alone in that thought for the time being. And it didn’t last too long, honestly.

Claptrap was his friend, after all.  


	84. Part Eighty-Four.  The Trip

**Part Eighty-Four. The Trip**

 

 

 

Claptrap had invited Wheatley to Pandora a few days previous, though that part he hadn't mentioned to GLaDOS. Not because he thought she would stop him from going; he didn't, and was pretty sure she'd be just as amused by that as everything else. But the truth was, even though Wheatley did want to see what Pandora was like, he was too afraid to go. Pandora wasn't safe, and Claptrap had mentioned robots weren't liked too much over there. He would like to see Claptrap's home, but he didn't want to die while he was doing it. They also were used primarily for human labour, which he greatly disliked and wasn’t sure he wanted to be anywhere near.

Claptrap, however, had most likely thought he was avoiding going because of GLaDOS herself and had apparently brought it up with her when Wheatley wasn't around. "You're supposed to go places your friends invite you to, moron," she told him after he'd tried to hedge the question of why he hadn't mentioned it to her. "Pandora isn't completely lawless, you know."

"But you can buy a gun out of a, out of a vending machine!" he protested.

"If it were legal here I'd be doing it myself. Though... now that I think of it, there’s no reason it can’t be legal now…. In any case. Stop being such a chicken and just go."

"I'm not a chicken!" he declared hotly, though he very much was, and GLaDOS just stared at him with the top half of her lens raised until he relented, "Alright, maybe I... maybe I'm not as brave as I could be."

She laughed a little. "Nothing will happen to you. It will probably be boring after the novelty wears off, really. Claptrap doesn't get out all that much. He'll take you to see Dr Z and Moxxi but that will probably be it."

"Oh, he talks 'bout them, sometimes," Wheatley said. "There's also uh, this Sir Hammerlock guy and uh, and the uh... the mechanic."

"Them as well."

"I kind of... would like to go," he said hesitantly, wondering if she really meant it.

"So pick a day and go."

"You're really... you're actually okay with it?"

"Why wouldn't I be?" All of a sudden she laughed and said, "Never mind. I understand now."

"What d'you... what d'you understand?"

"You're afraid to go and you're hoping I'll tell you you can't so you don't have to tell Claptrap you're chickening out," she answered teasingly, tilting her core forward knowingly, and even as he said "That's not true!", he could feel himself blushing in response to her statement. She could hear it as well as he could and it made her laugh again.

"You can blame me if you really want to," she told him, "but it's fine with me."

"There's really no reason to be scared?" he asked, in more of a small voice than he'd meant.

"Really."

"Okay, I... I'll go." God, just saying that was scary.

"Do you want me to tell him? So you can't back out?"

"N-no," Wheatley stammered. "I'll uh, I'll let him know myself.”

He decided to make his exit then, so that he wouldn’t have to think about how scared he was and couldn’t use her to let him back out, and in doing so he crashed into that Core again! ... Meghan, was it?

“Oh,” she said.

“We’ve got to stop uh, stop meeting like this,” Wheatley gasped.

“Yeah,” Meghan said, nodding a little. “We should uh… _arrange_ a meeting, instead.”

Wheatley frowned. “Uh… what d’you mean, _arrange._ ”

She shrugged, not looking at him all of a sudden. “You know… meet up sometime. Instead of… of crashing into each other in the hallway.”

“Ahhhh,” Wheatley said, not really getting it but pretending to anyway. “And… and when were you thinking of… of having this… meeting.”

“Whenever,” she answered, in a decidedly bad nonchalant sort of way. “I’m not busy, um… tomorrow.”

“I think I will be,” Wheatley mused. “I’m about to plan a trip. But tell you what. We’ll uh, we’ll arrange something when I get back. Alright?”

“Sure,” Meghan said, smiling a little too enthusiastically, and then she disappeared.

Wheatley shook his core. What an _odd_ girl.

 

**//**

Claptrap, surprisingly, was not overly enthused when Wheatley told him he’d be up to go to Pandora. When Wheatley tried to extract the reason, Claptrap waffled about and provided no answers. When Wheatley tried to figure out why he was doing _that_ , Claptrap got extremely defensive and refused to talk any further.

Somehow, Wheatley still ended up arranging to go to Pandora the following afternoon. He was thoroughly confused about Claptrap’s change in attitude – he’d seemed gung-ho about the idea when he’d first brought it up – but he _was_ terribly curious. And he’d not get an opportunity like this in the future, probably. A trip to another planet? Not until GLaDOS built her extraterrestrial facilities, at least, and that was only if she’d let him go. She probably wouldn’t. She’d worry he’d be kidnapped by aliens or something, all the while going on about how _no_ alien would want to go _near_ him. He smiled a little at that. She was so cute, even when he was imagining her.

“Well, luv, I’m off!” he declared when the requisite time came, stopping dramatically before the doorway, but she didn’t so much as look at him when she returned, “Goodbye.”

He didn’t know what he’d been expecting, really, though you’d _think_ that his _fiancée_ (a fancy German word referring to beautiful supercomputers, or something like that) would have a bit more of a _reaction_ upon the departure of her… whatever he was. Then she tilted her core in consideration, and he perked up a bit. Aah, _now_ she was going to say something!

“Come back in one piece.”

“ _What_?” Wheatley squacked, chassis dropping in shock. “ _Come back in one piece? You said it was safe!_ ”

“It _is_ safe,” GLaDOS told him, laughing and looking up at him. “I’m just teasing.”

“You’re being an arse, you mean,” Wheatley grumbled.

She shrugged. “I can do that too.”

“Fine. I’m leaving. And, and maybe I’ll have so much fun I won’t come back!” Terribly unlikely, but he was getting annoyed with her flippancy and wanted to get a rise out of her, somehow. She made a disdainful electronic noise.

“I doubt it.”

Wheatley turned around in a huff. Fine. Who cared. He’d go and hang out with Claptrap for a day or two, and she’d miss him and regret what she’d said, but when he came back he wouldn’t go to her, ohhhh no! He’d go find… hm. He _could_ go and find Meghan… it wasn’t very nice, to hang out with her to get back at GLaDOS, but hey, he would do what he had to.

“Wheatley,” she said, in a way that told him he was a bit ridiculous for being so upset about it, “come here.”

And he did, though not entirely happily. He knew she wasn’t so impersonal as to send him off to another planet with a goodbye and a warning, but at the same time… he couldn’t shake the feeling that she actually _would_.

“Goodbye,” she said, kissing the top of his optic, which of course fixed everything. “Have fun.”

“I’ll miss you,” he told her quietly, kissing her back, and when he’d done that she shook her core and looked at the monitor she’d been studying.

“You’ll be gone two days. You won’t collapse if you forget about me for the both of them.”

“Forget about you?” Wheatley said incredulously.

“I won’t be there. No need to dwell on me.”

“You won’t forget me, will you?” Wheatley asked in a panic, wondering spontaneously if there were Cores hanging about, waiting to swoop in on her while he was gone. She stared at him incredulously.

“You’re being an idiot. Get out before I throw you out.”

“That was… that was silly,” he admitted. “I just… I’ve never left the facility before! On purpose, I mean, obviously I’ve uh, I’ve… been out of it. And I just… I dunno, aren’t I a… a good part of it, there? Will it go on without me?”

“I’ll be taking care of the programs you’re in charge of, yes.”

He had forgotten entirely about that. “Alright, alright,” he said, hoping she didn’t know it’d slipped his mind. “Then… I’ll be off!”

“Goodbye,” she said pointedly, for the third time, and Wheatley decided it was as good a queue as any and made his exit.

“All right, Wheats,” Claptrap said, waving as he got to Claptrap’s teleporter thingy. It had a name, he just could never remember what it was called. “Ready?”

“Yeah…” Wheatley answered, entirely unconvincingly, and Claptrap laughed and reached up to remove him from the management rail.

“Don’t worry, pal. Nothing to be scared of. Except for bullymongs. They’re pretty vicious, and you should probably be scared of them.”

“What… what’s a bullymong?” Wheatley asked, wondering if he wanted to go through with this after all, but Claptrap was holding onto him so there wasn’t really an escape to be had at this point.

“Don’t worry about it,” Claptrap said, waving his free hand dismissively. “We won’t run into any. Probably.”

Maybe he really _wouldn’t_ make it home in one piece…

 

**//**

 

Pandora was a rough place.

Not because there was a lot of violence, or suspiciously shady characters, or just unpleasant people in general. There was some of each of those things, but that wasn't it. IT was... a little hard to explain.

If he'd had to start somewhere, though, it would have been with the grittiness of the place. It felt as though Pandora had a fine layer of dirt on it no one had bothered to clear off. He FELT it as soon as he got there, felt like he had been enveloped in the pervading grime, and he soon realised he'd never been truly dirty before. Been rolled around in the dirt, yes, but nothing like this. It felt like it had taken every inch of him for itself, and he had a sudden homesickness for the sterility of Aperture. Pandora was so different it just felt _wrong_.

"Well," Claptrap said, waving one hand, "home sweet home. I'll show you my place first, but that's not gonna take very long."

Claptrap did live in a literal alley, and seeing it made Wheatley very sad. No AI should be stuck in a place like that. Even though Wheatley was, as usual, clamped to the top of his chassis and unable to see him, Claptrap still seemed to know what he was thinking. "I know it's not very much," he told Wheatley, "but... it's all I got."

It looked like _nobody_ on Pandora had very much. Most of the buildings were run down, and the humans here were barely better outfitted than the ones back at Aperture. Everyone had a gun. What for if the planet wasn't dangerous, Wheatley didn't know, and when he asked, Claptrap shrugged and said: "We like to be prepared here. Handsome Jack's long gone, but no one wants to be caught off guard ever again."

Moxxi's was clean at least, mostly. It was a dark establishment with a neon sign upfront, with a smattering of tables and what Wheatley supposed was the bar. He knew about that from Carrie, what a bar was. A place where humans drank odd liquids in order to muddy up their brains. A bizarre pursuit, in Wheatley’s opinion, but humans were weird overall. The humans that were in there glanced at Wheatley with studied disinterest, possibly because he was with Claptrap.

Claptrap hoisted himself onto one of the cracked leather stools in front of the bar and placed Wheatley on the one next to him. A human woman who Wheatley was guessing was Moxxi herself, seeing as she was behind the counter and no one else was. "Hey Moxxi!" Claptrap called out, waving one hand in the air. "Look! I _told_ you I have friends!"

"Apparently you do," Moxxi answered in what was immediately reminiscent of GLaDOS when she was... in a very good mood. "What're you called, sugar?"

Seeing as she already knew Claptrap's name, Wheatley supposed she was asking him and said, "Wheatley."

Moxxi raised on eyebrow. "Never heard of a robot with a real name before."

"Really?" Wheatley asked, dumbfounded.

"Where you from?" she went on, leaning with her arms crossed over the counter. He struggled not to focus on the question of why she was wearing a hat that didn't seem to fit and answered,

"I'm from uh, from Aperture."

She frowned. "Where's that? Never heard of it."

"A looooong way from here, Mox," Claptrap cut in.

"You had to scour the galaxy to find a friend, huh?" Moxxi said, smiling at Claptrap and straightening. "At least he's not imaginary this time."

"Yeah," said Claptrap in a bit of a resigned sigh. "At least."

After Moxxi headed off, Claptrap folded his hands into each other as best he could and stared at the counter in silence for a long time. Wheatley didn't know what to do. He'd never seen Claptrap... _quiet_ before.

"Sorry for bringing you here," he said finally.

Wheatley frowned. "Why're you apologising?"

"I didn't even mean for you to come here," Claptrap went on. "I don't know, I got excited one day and... you should've stayed home."

"Claptrap - "

"You're so lucky, you know," Claptrap interrupted quietly. "I wish I'd tried harder to... to keep her."

"Claptrap, you c'n stay there, if you want," Wheatley said. "We don't mind. Look, I can... we already discussed it. You and me, we can both uh, we can both have her. It -"

"No," Claptrap cut in yet again. "I can't."

“Why not?” Wheatley asked, confused.

Claptrap looked in the direction of the bar.

“I can’t share her,” he answered finally. “I know. It sounds dumb. But I’ve been trying, Wheats. And I just… you guys are the best – well, the only friends I ever had. So I don’t want to seem like a jerk! But I can’t share her. I can’t do it.”

Wheatley didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to see Claptrap unhappy, but… he wasn’t going to give up GLaDOS for him, even if GLaDOS would agree to such a thing. Which he _really_ hoped she wouldn’t.

“You guys are great. You really are,” Claptrap continued. “But… I don’t have much, and what I _do_ have… I gotta have it all to myself. I… I love her. I do. But I can’t… I can’t _compete_ with you. I’m not gonna win and it’s gonna screw everything up.”

“There’s no need to compete,” Wheatley told him, wondering how to salvage the situation. “We’re not like… like the same person, y’know, looking for a space that can only hold, can only take one of us. She needs both of us for diff’rent reasons, and it, it’s not… not a contest.”

“She doesn’t need me,” Claptrap said morosely, pushing his hands together. “Nobody does.”

“’course we do.” Wheatley didn’t know exactly what was going on, here, but he was going to do his best to fix it. “You’re our friend. You, you give us a view of what, what it’s like to be a robot outside of, of our little bubble. And that’s _important_ , it is, because, well, you… you can teach us things. God, you led a _rebellion_ , Claptrap, and yeah, it failed, but… d’you have any idea of the number of robots ‘round Aperture, back in the day? D’you have an idea how many of us hated everything about our lives, but couldn’t pluck up the… the motivation, the courage, any of that, we just kept hating ev’rything and wond’ring why it never got better. Even… even Gladys only took over the facility because the humans were driving her crazy. She didn’t do it to make things better for ev’ryone else, like you did. What you did… it was brave. And it was… _for_ something. Wasn’t just to help yourself, it was to help ev’ryone like you. That’s… it’s a good example of a good person.”

“I guess so,” Claptrap muttered. “But whatever the reason I did it for… they’re all dead now. I killed all of them. I screwed up big-time and there’s nothing that can be done to fix that. All of them are gone, because of me. What kind of example is that? All it tells you is that I’m an idiot.”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Wheatley answered. “Just means… that you didn’t quite make it. They all followed you. That means something.”

Claptrap slapped his hand on the bar and looked at Wheatley. “It doesn’t mean _anything_ , Wheats. Except that people believe I’m someone I’m not, and can’t be. Just like you’re going on about. I fall through. There’s no point in believing in me. And that means it’s better this way.”

“What… what is,” Wheatley asked. He had a sinking feeling he was _not_ going to be able to fix this, and that he’d made a terrible mistake by coming here in the first place.

“Even if I could share her,” Claptrap went on, turning back to face the bar again, “I’d fail her too. I’d screw up everything, like I did before.”

“It wasn’t totally your fault,” Wheatley argued. “ _Both_ of you failed the other. It wasn’t, wasn’t totally to do with you. She told me about it, about what happened, and what she was, was thinking at the time, and it just… it wasn’t your fault. Neither of you were ready. That’s all it was.”

“Wheatley,” Claptrap said seriously, “you’re a good guy. And I get it. You want to fix this all up so I can go back to Aperture with you and live happily ever after. But that’s not something I can do. You guys… you guys helped yourselves out. Whatever issues you had in the beginning, you don’t have them anymore. You’re different. But me? I’m the same guy I’ve been for years. I’m not gonna change.”

“We didn’t fix _ourselves_.” What did he have to _say_ to make Claptrap understand? “We helped each _other_. Claptrap, you can’t… you can’t just fix _yourself_. You’ve gotta, you’ve gotta get your _friends_ to help you! You can’t always see where you’re going wrong, or going right, really, and you need _help_! And it’s okay to ask for it, and, and to get it, doesn’t mean you’re a failure or any of that, it’s – “

“I don’t wanna talk about this anymore,” Claptrap said, sliding off the stool. “C’mon, I’ll show you something else.”

“But – “

“Maybe Scooter’s around,” Claptrap interrupted, ignoring him. “He might have gone to see his sister. I don’t know what he’s up to these days!”

And Wheatley let Claptrap attach him to the top of his chassis, not that he really had a choice, and they went and had a chat with a scrungy mechanic with a very lazy accent – not that Wheatley’s was any better, honestly – and all the while Wheatley was a bit distracted with trying to think of a way to convince Claptrap to come back to Aperture with him, and to let himself and GLaDOS help him. But every time he tried to bring it up, Claptrap would change the subject. So eventually Wheatley let it drop. It put a dampener on the trip, because he really wanted to help the other robot, but… how did he get someone who didn’t want help to accept it? How was he supposed to do that? Even with GLaDOS, the most stubborn supercomputer to ever exist, it had not been so difficult. Because she had been _willing_ to help herself, was that it? She had _believed_ change would be good for her? That was the only difference Wheatley could see. Any desire to help himself Claptrap had had was long gone, and Wheatley didn’t know how to revive it.

And he was afraid that Claptrap would not allow him to try.


End file.
